Antonia Pozzi
trans. by Amy Newman
Offering to a Tomb
From above you showed me
beyond the ruinous slide of houses
a black finger-pointing of cypresses
shot up through the blue
to watch over
the white marbles of the cemetery.
I thought of a tomb
that I've never seen
and it felt like
I was laying down, in that moment,
a trembling heart barely touching my hands,
a living weight
of red carnations.
Antonia Pozzi was born in Milan in 1912 and took her life in 1938. None of her poetry was published during her lifetime. Among her papers are notebooks containing over 300 poems, a number of which were posthumously altered by her father Roberto, and then published. In 1989, editors Alessandra Cenni and Onorina Dino restored the poems to their original form in Parole, an authoritative text of Pozzi’s poetry, the most recently revised edition of which is Tutte le opera (2009), edited by Cenni.
Amy Newman's most recent book is On This Day in Poetry History (Persea, 2016). Her translations of the poems and letters of Antonia Pozzi appear in Bennington Review, Cagibi, Columbia Journal, Delos, Interim, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is professor of English at Northern Illinois University.