Leopardi's Pensieri--a collection of aphorisms in the great European tradition of literary social commentary--focuses on the eternal conflict between knowledge and illusion. W.S. Di Piero offers the first translation into English of the entire text of the Pensieri.

Pensieri: A Bilingual Edition (Gb768)

LEOPARDI, GIACOMO

Di Piero, W.S.

Literature & Fiction

Oxford University Press

Series Copy Based on the conviction that only translators who write poetry themselves can properly recreate the celebrated and timeless tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, The Greek Tragedies in New Translations series offers new translations that go beyond the literal meaning of the Greek in order to evoke the poetry of the originals. Under the editorship of Herbert Golder and the late William Arrowsmith, each volume includes a critical introduction, commentary on the text, full stage directions, and a glossary of the mythical and geographical references in the plays. One of Euripides' late plays, Ion is a complex enactment of the changing relations between the human and divine orders and the way in which our understanding of the gods is mediated and re-visioned by myths. The story begins years before the play begins, with the rape of the mortal Kreousa, queen of Athens, by Apollo. Kreousa bears Apollos' child in secret then abandons it. Unbeknownst to her, Apollo has the child brought to his temple at Delphi to be reared by the priestess as ward of the shrine. Many years later, Kreousa, now married to the foreigner Xouthos but childless, comes to Delphi seeking prophecy about children. Apollo, however, speaking through the oracle, bestows the temple ward, Ion, on Xouthos as his child. Enraged, Kreousa conspires to kill as an interloper the very son she has despaired of finding. After mother and son both try to kill each other, the priestess reveals the birth tokens that permit Kreousa to recognize and embrace the child she thought was dead. Ion discovers the truth of his parentage and departs for Athens, as a mixed blood of humanity and divinity, to participate in the life of the polis. In Ion, disturbing riptides of thought and feeling run just below the often shimmering surfaces of Euripidean melodrama. Although the play contains some of Euripides' most beautiful lyrical writing, it quivers throughout with near disasters, poorly informed actions and misdirected intentions that almost result in catastrophe. Kreousa says at one point that good and evil do not mix, but Euripides' argument, and what the youthful Ion strives to understand, is that human beings are not only compounded of good and evil, but that the two are often the same thing differently experienced, differently understood, just as beauty and violence are mixed both in the gods and in the mortal world.

Ion (Greek Tragedy in New Translations)

Eurípides

Dramas & Plays

The Restorers (Phoenix Poets)

The poems in this, W. S. Di Piero's fifth collection of poetry, are animated by an ancient vision of the human state as existing somewhere between the divine and the bestial; tense with the compulsion toward formal order and the wild yearning after chaos, these are tough poems, gritty and relentless; they indulge neither the reader nor the poet. Their austere lyricism expresses Di Piero's desire for transcendent meaning, and their unflinching attention to natural and cultural history reflects an equally strong instinct for the earthbound.

Poetry

University of Chicago Press

The poems in this, W. S. Di Piero's fifth collection of poetry, are animated by an ancient vision of the human state as existing somewhere between the divine and the bestial; tense with the compulsion toward formal order and the wild yearning after chaos, these are tough poems, gritty and relentless; they indulge neither the reader nor the poet. Their austere lyricism expresses Di Piero's desire for transcendent meaning, and their unflinching attention to natural and cultural history reflects an equally strong instinct for the earthbound.

This selection of W. S. Di Piero’s poems, covering eight individual collections over the last quarter century and offering fifteen strong new poems, is a chance to savor the career of a poet enthralled by the seductive music of life as it is lived. Here are Di Piero’s consuming preoccupations: the pull of faith and the suspicion of transcendence; urban worlds and the mysterious jazz of street language; desire and sexual need and love and loss, everything marked by what one early poem calls “the bruise of chance.” Through it all, Di Piero delivers what he has called, in William James’s phrase, “the hard, bright particulars of physical existence.” No poet is more visceral; these poems carry the sparkling tension and urgency of an artist who does not write or live intellectually, but locally. Di Piero’s sensibility seems to spring from the mood on the streets of San Francisco or float down from the flung-open shutters in his ancestors’ Italian villages; the economy of his language has its source in his native South Philly, where “When I was young, they taught us not to ask. / Accept what’s there . . . Brick homes, Your Show of Shows, / the mothball fleet and flaring oilworks.” “Poetry exists not to simplify our sense of life and death but to absorb and express its complexities and mixed tones,” Di Piero has written. Throughout this volume, those tones are at play, as this essential poet squares up in front of experience and all it brings.

Chinese Apples: New and Selected Poems

KNOPF

W. S. Di Piero, a fresh and powerful voice in American poetry, opens this collection about public and private worlds with poems that revist the deaths of his parents. It is an important adult passage for him, and for them a last chance to leave a message: his father lying in bed, "bemused and contemptuous / of the hell in which he lay"; his mother soon to be laid out in the cheap gold flats "that made her look young and men look twice." Di Piero writes poems of relationships, of ordinary beauty, of the deep, vsieral memories that shape who we become. He reveals the art in the everyday--sometimes literally, as when he spies a Vermeer beauty in a girl with nose studs at the ATM, or Van Gogh's self-portrait in a small-time bookie. Whether describing the uncertainty of sexual love ("...your footpads / wet after a bath / left prints like / our conversations / every which way") or a panhandler in Port Authority ("Show you to your bus / or an excellent candy bar?"), he is delicate and direct at once, a no-nonsense guide to his surroundings who is moved by what he sees. His strong, elegantly simple statements of truths of feeling go beyond the pleasure of the words themselves and restore us to the thrill of honesty in our own lives.

Skirts and Slacks

W. S. Di Piero, a fresh and powerful voice in American poetry, opens this collection about public and private worlds with poems that revisit the deaths of his parents. It is an important adult passage for him, and for them a last chance to leave a message: his father lying in bed, “bemused and contemptuous / of the hell in which he lay”; his mother soon to be laid out in the cheap gold flats “that made her look young and men look twice.” Di Piero writes poems of relationships, of ordinary beauty, of the deep, visceral memories that shape who we become. He reveals the art in the everyday—sometimes literally, as when he spies a Vermeer beauty in a girl with nose studs at the ATM, or van Gogh’s self-portrait in a small-time bookie. Whether describing the uncertainty of sexual love (“. . . your footpads / wet after a bath / left prints like / our conversations / every which way”) or a panhandler in Port Authority (“Show you to your bus / or an excellent candy bar?”), he is delicate and direct at once, a no-nonsense guide to his surroundings who is moved by what he sees. His strong, elegantly simple statements of truths of feeling go beyond the pleasure of the words themselves and restore us to the thrill of honesty in our own lives.

Brother Fire: Poems

In this rich collection, W. S. Di Piero seeks the spirit and substance of illumination in all its forms. He finds meaning, or shows us how we attempt to do so, in the rituals and events that mark our year–the Fourth of July, Halloween, New Year’s Eve–and in the ordinary activities of mowing, dancing, drinking, trying to stay warm. “The Kiss” recounts how, as a young man, the poet was not called to the priesthood; in “Prayer Meeting,” he recalls watching his mother iron, with her “hopeless routine longing,” and declares, “I wanted more than what I prayed for.” For all their simplicity, Di Piero’s direct, often conversational turns of phrase reveal a world aflame with troubles, with love, with surprising lyrical epiphanies.Didn’t You Say Desire Islike the elephant fogshredded northa white sun going downBessemers firedthrough clouds horizonedon my dog-eared stackIt feels good and rightto waste earnest hoursof an early evening’sdaylight saving timein uncertainty and wantthese cranky climateschanging in us while wehaven’t started dinner yet.

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Now in paperback: the “lovely and evocative book” (San Francisco Chronicle) of poems both new and old that celebrates a quarter century of passionate engagement with real life and its transformation into poetic form: the pull of faith and the poet’s suspicion of transcendence, urban worlds and the mysterious jazz of street language, desire and sexual need, love and loss.

United States

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Out of Eden: Essays on Modern Art

Out of Eden presents the rigorous investigations and musings of a poet-essayist on the ways in which modern artists have confronted and transfigured the realist tradition of representation. Di Piero pursues his theme with an autobiographical force and immediacy. He fixes his attention on painters and photographers as disparate as Cezanne, Boccioni, Pollock, Warhol, Edward Weston, and Robert Frank. There is indeed a satisfying sweep to this collection: Matisse, Giacometti, Morandi, Bacon, the Tuscan Macchiaioli of the late nineteenth century, the Futurists of the early modern period, and the American pop painters. Di Piero's analysis of modern images also probes the relation between new kinds of image making and transcendence. The author argues that Matisse and Giacometti, for example, continued to exercise the religious imagination even in a desacralized age. And because Di Piero believes that the visual arts and poetry live intimate, coordinate lives, his essays speak of the relation of poetry to forms in art.

University of California Press

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Books by Di Piero, W.S.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Di Piero, W.S.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Pensieri: A Bilingual Edition (Gb768)

Ion (Greek Tragedy in New Translations)

The Restorers (Phoenix Poets)

The Restorers (Phoenix Poets)

Chinese Apples: New and Selected Poems

Skirts and Slacks

Skirts and Slacks

Brother Fire: Poems

Chinese Apples: New and Selected Poems

Out of Eden: Essays on Modern Art