Left-Handed

"From his first book to this breakthrough Left-handed, I have been reading Jonathan Galassi's poems with pleasure, admiration, and a fascination with what I took to be the presence, in his mind and ear, of Italian poetry as well as English. He had the luck to be familiar with the Italian language and its poetry all his life; the lucidity and lyric streams of Ungaretti and other great modern Italian poesy must have been benign ancestral voices for him as his own poetry evolved. He has also devoted years of work to translating the poems of Montale and Leopardi, both of them difficult and idiosyncratic, and the influence of that work, I believe, has been important in the clarity, tone, and intimacy of these most recent poems, and their candor and elegance." —W. S. Merwin "Heart-wrenching . . . The narrator of these poems is aware that 'time is short / you have to live it.' Left-handed, he is irregular, if not quite a misfit, but he manages to find in discontinuity the force to pursue his chronicle of changing love to its logical, and unexpectedly tonic, conclusion." —John Ashbery From / Poetry. Org