Last Stops of the Night Journey - by Milo de Angelis (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Glimmering meditations on time, memory, imprisonment, human connection, life and death by the preeminent Italian language poet, Milo De Angelis

An arrow hits a grape and carries it through the air, a hand untangles a knot, a voice emerges from a stone to speak about life. In his poems, Milo De Angelis attends to the experience of confinement. Since 1996, he has taught poetry in a high-security prison on the outskirts of Milan. He sees poetry as a daily salvation; when the knot comes undone, it "carries back the sweet human voice of bodies in motion." And when the stone cracks open, a voice tells of you and of me, a shared story. De Angelis never shies from the deep fears, darkness, and indeterminacy of incarceration. The characters of these poems wonder whether they will survive. They know all that stays hidden in an end, and they plan for their salvation. Milo De Angelis's language is ancient and new, transcendent, and urgent. Last Stops of the Night Journey pulses with the immensity of silence, memory, life, time, and fear. De Angelis insists that the infinite language of poetry can speak to the incarcerated person, greet them, know them, and chart a world beyond physical walls.

Review Quotes

"Born in 'the shadow of what we have kept silent' and nourished by the 'wounded and uneasy voice' of the incarcerated, Last Stops of the Night Journey is both grounded and transcendent: at once a revelation of all the human heart is capable of, and a reminder that--as the poet says--'poetry is not on our side / but in a terrible and lonely place, where no one / remains intact.' In this generous collection--whose arrival in an elegant translation is an event to celebrate--the poet shows us what it means to live in the shadow of the carceral, where the 'home of the disappeared...disappears inside us, ' and our heartbeat says 'locked-up, locked up.' Remarkable for their clarity of vision, for language at once grave and graceful, for unforgettable images (resonant as symbols), these meditations on memory, time, and death invite us to breathe, together and alone, 'a song of pure ice, ' and to learn what it means to cry out where there are no angels, where we suffer, as Claudia Rankine reminds us (quoting Judith Butler) 'from the condition of being addressable, ' haunted and hurt by silence: 'And you begin to hear, in the words you said, the breath of those you didn't say: they are there, they are there, they knock on the door.' Open the door to your heart: open this book--we have never so badly needed this poetry, these charged and tender encounters." --Laura Mullen

"Last Stops of the Night Journey by Milo De Angelis is a profound and haunting exploration of memory, mortality, and the human condition. Drawing from his decades of teaching in a high-security prison and his encounters with figures and shadows of the past, De Angelis crafts a forensic accounting, where love, loss, exile, and redemption intertwine. With vivid imagery and philosophical depth, he meditates on the fragility of human connection, the transformative power of poetry, and the inexorable passage of time. Lucky for us that Patrizio Ceccagnoli and Susan Stewart have given us this extraordinarily powerful and plaintive translation." --Peter Gizzi

About the Author

From his publication of Somiglianze at the age of 25, Milo De Angelis has garnered much recognition. Known beyond his poetry for his literary essays and his translations of Virgil, Lucretius, Racine, Baudelaire, Blanchot, and others, in the 1970's he founded the literary journal Il Niebo. In 2005, his Tema dell'addio was awarded the Premio Viareggio. In 2011 Quell'andarsene was awarded the Premio Cetonaverde, the Premio Pascoli, the Premio Romagna, and the Premio Mondello. Incontri e agguati received the Premio Dessì, the Premio Nazionale di Poesia "Luciana Notari," and the Premio Castello di Villalta Poesia in 2016. In 2017, De Angelis was awarded the prestigious Premio Lerici Pea for his body of work.

Susan Stewart, the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University, is a poet, critic, and translator. A former MacArthur Fellow and Chancellor of the Academy of American poets, she is the author of six books of poems, including Columbarium, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and, most recently, Cinder: New and Selected Poems. Her many prose works include On Longing, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, The Open Studio: Essays in Art and Aesthetics, and The Poet's Freedom. Her forthcoming book The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture will be available from The University of Chicago Press in Fall 2019.

Patrizio Ceccagnoli is a translator, a managing editor of Italian Poetry Review, and a professor of Italian at the University of Kansas. He has edited multiple unpublished manuscripts by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, for which he was nominated for the Marino Moretti Award. He has also been nominated for the American Literary Translator's Association Annual Award for his work co-translating Milo De Angelis.