L'America dei Padri / The Fathers' America

Ernesto Livorni, certainly among the most productive and surprising Italian-language poets who live and work in the United States, is a poet who fully participates in the situation here described, in the company of Mario Moroni and Alessandro Carrera in the generation immediately following the fi rst Italian-language 'greats' from across the ocean, Paolo Valesio and Luigi Ballerini. Livorni is coming off a work of great metaphoric tension, entitled Nel libro che ti diedi (Campanotto, 1998), neither too 'alla buona' nor 'alla confusa', as he wrote auto-ironically in the two sections of his text. In that role, he found in sonnet form ever more certain and happily contrasting pretexts to his own impulse towards overabundance: "With you I burned the dark earth: / and yet we play with sunken eyes/ as if we were old twigs."