Antonia Pozzi (1912–1938) is one of the most intimate and haunting voices of modern Italian poetry: a poet who wrote secretly, and with a clarity that feels incandescent even today. Her work, steeped in the landscapes of Milan and the mountains of the Valsassina, moves with rare purity between tenderness and anguish, between the visible world and the tremor beneath it. To enter Antonia Pozzi’s poetry is to cross a threshold where emotion is luminous, exact, and perilous. Her poems, written in the confined span of a life marked by longing, restraint, and an almost metaphysical attentiveness, possess a clarity that does not soothe but exposes the contradictions of life.
In this bilingual edition, Italian award-winning contemporary poet Stefania Lucchetti, who is bilingual, invites English-speaking readers into Pozzi’s complex interior world. Living in Milan, only steps away from Pozzi’s former home, Lucchetti approaches Pozzi’s poems not as distant artifacts but as living presences: texts that still echo in the same streets, the same winter light, the same silence that shaped them. Faithful yet fluid, Lucchetti’s translations preserve the original voice while allowing it to breathe in a new language.
Presented without heavy commentary – because poetry, here, must be felt rather than explained – this collection offers a rare encounter with a poet whose brief life left behind an enduring and haunting voice.
(Cover art: portrait of Antonia Pozzi by Italian painter Francesca Draetta, 2025)
