Most of the Stars
An American Song
Published on 31. March 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
250 pages
978-1-58731-534-3 (ISBN)
Description
The muse of Pietro Federico's most recent collection of poems, La Maggioranza delle Stelle (Most of the Stars), is the United States of America, her people and landscapes. In fifty poems (one for each state), Federico plumbs the depths of the historic, geographic, political, emotional, psychological, and metaphysical realms through a variety of voices of these fifty states. Translated from Italian into English by the author with American poet John Poch, this book is unlike any other collection of poems. Federico is fascinated by the American spirit, to use the words of Giancarlo Pontiggia, "an America made up of stories as raw, rough, endless and inconclusive as the immense landscapes in which they took place."
In Most of the Stars the linguistic power of the Italian literary tradition and the contemporary vernacular combine to articulate an idiosyncratic understanding of the New World-the breadth of its cities, its towns, its frontiers and interiors. Federico's deeply spiritual understanding of our own American personalities and histories offers us a gift of beautiful objectivity. Students of poetry, linguistics, and cultural anthropology will be grateful to Federico and Poch for the wonder offered in this bilingual collection.
In Most of the Stars the linguistic power of the Italian literary tradition and the contemporary vernacular combine to articulate an idiosyncratic understanding of the New World-the breadth of its cities, its towns, its frontiers and interiors. Federico's deeply spiritual understanding of our own American personalities and histories offers us a gift of beautiful objectivity. Students of poetry, linguistics, and cultural anthropology will be grateful to Federico and Poch for the wonder offered in this bilingual collection.
Reviews / Votes
"There is an America that has nourished us since childhood, an America made up of stories as raw, rough, endless and inconclusive as the immense landscapes in which they took place: those landscapes, after all, were stronger than the stories themselves, and they spoke to us from afar, from a place that did not concern us, and which yet was in us before us, as Pavese sensed, who started from Whitman's America to reach, at the end of his great poetic journey, an archaic Greece, pre-Olympic and wild, dripping with blood and mud."--Giancarlo Pontiggia
"The poetry of Most of the Stars contrasts sharply with contemporary Italian poetry, also and above all with the poetry of Italian poets of my age. The poetry of my country has been focused for centuries (and still continues to focus) exclusively on the analysis and expression of emotional states and on the projection of oneself on reality, often making reality, nature, the cosmos disappear to the advantage of said projections, thus ending up reducing the Vision, the evocative force of reality to a point of view. What I try to do here, through epic and mimesis, is to re-activate our thousand-year-old tradition by re-proposing words as radiations of things ("Nomina sunt consequentia rerum", as Dante says: names/words as consequences of things), as the result of the poet listening to the cosmos." -- PIETRO FEDERICO "Most of the stars is a powerful, compact, realistic and visionary work, written in a language that well combines lyricism and narrative vein, a new work compared to the average of contemporary Italian poetry. It is not a journey through the States, it is much more, it is a journey in the spirit of America, of its culture, of the deep layers of its melting pot." -- GIUSEPPE CONTE
"What has always struck me in the poetry but also in the person of Pietro Federico is the momentum. A momentum built from faith and despair together, love and death, like that sprinting into the dark at the end of Arkansas, one of the poems published here. Pietro talks about each state, identifying himself with indigenous characters, either real or fictional. And it is as though he had lived in those places as a child, or even before childhood. It is as though he had lived there in other lives." -- CLAUDIO DAMIANI
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Indiana
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 23 mm
Weight
367 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-58731-534-3 (9781587315343)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
PIETRO FEDERICO was born in Bologna, Italy in 1980, and currently lives in Rome. Writer, copywriter, story editor and professional translator, his poetry books are: Non nulla (2003, Ibiskos Editore, Empoli) winner of the prize "Il Fiore" Pistoia 2003; Mare Aperto (Nino Aragno Editore, Turin, 2015) winner of the Subiaco Award 2015 and Ceppo Award 2017; La maggioranza delle stelle - Canto Americano (Edizioni Ensemble, Rome, 2020).
JOHN POCH's poems and translations have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, Agni, and many other magazines. His most recent collection of poems is Texases (WordFarm 2019). He is the series editor of the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and he recently edited the collection, Gracious: Poems from the 21st Century South (TTU Press 2020). His first book of criticism, God's Poems: The Beauty of Poetry and the Christian Imagination was published by St. Augustine's Press (2022). He teaches at Grace College in Indiana.
JOHN POCH's poems and translations have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, Agni, and many other magazines. His most recent collection of poems is Texases (WordFarm 2019). He is the series editor of the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and he recently edited the collection, Gracious: Poems from the 21st Century South (TTU Press 2020). His first book of criticism, God's Poems: The Beauty of Poetry and the Christian Imagination was published by St. Augustine's Press (2022). He teaches at Grace College in Indiana.