By any measure The Dragonfly is an extraordinary work of a young poet stretching the language between meaning and the paradoxical, and in turn engaging in an often-Manichean battle to define the ethical and moral. Sailing into the wind of the era of existentialism, the tacking and lurching of Amelia Rosselli’s poems reflects her singular struggle to question yet survive the world as-is—the world that exists outside us—and the world of thoughts and emotions that comes with being born. It is a complex book with many moving parts that is rich in music and meaning.
Though The Dragonfly in no way conforms to its Epic model, the Divine Comedy, echoes can be heard in various parts of the work—some quite subtle while other are obvious. On page 13 Rosselli writes, “Midway down a slender path / of small trifled-with grasses and lost in the / foul earth, I search, and you die beside / a fruitless tree, sterile as your hand.” Midway of course immediately calls to mind the first line of the Comedy: “Midway upon the journey of our life” (Elio Zapulla, 1998). Thus, Rosselli christens The Dragonfly by making it a descendent of the great Italian Epic. In her foul earth we smell Dante’s sulfur and brimstone. But is the punishment of sterility and the inability to bear fruit a reflection of the godlike Beatrice or herself?
And what sort of hell is this? Will we enter hell, purgatory, and paradise? As one of the translators Roberta Antognini points out in the afterword, the poet is “in search of liberty” in her Purgatory. Indeed, this world we live in is purgatory, whether one thinks they are in heaven or hell. Angels in epics tend to be quite boring; Paradise is a sort of heavenly Switzerland or Singapore where chocolate is the great sin and no smoking is allowed. On the other hand, purgatory allows a multiplicity of emotional and thought-provoking levels to exist. If they are hellish, it all lies in the open ground of the world-as-is.
There are, of course, other literary influences in the poem, the most obvious being Rimbaud and Montale, from whom Rosselli borrows female characters to extend the notion of Beatrice, the powerful female archetype whom she is and follows throughout the poem. Perhaps in Montale’s Esterina she also sees herself as the actress Carla Gravina in the movie Esterina, a young war orphan who is picked up by two truck drivers Gino and Piero. She falls for Gino who doesn’t respond, then she mysteriously disappears, and only then does Gino realizes what he has lost. Like this Esterina, Rosselli was an orphan. Her father, a leading anti-fascist, was assassinated in exile in France in 1937, and her mother, Marion Cave, was also a political activist who died in 1949 when Rosselli was 19. The movie came out in 1959, so perhaps it was one of the pieces added after the general date attributed to the poem’s completion, 1958—though Rosselli is known to have worked on it for many years afterwards.
For like Esterina in both Montale and the movie, the poem expresses passions sexual and otherwise: this is no bloodless world. The she of the poem bites the apple. Her heart is “of rubber but also burning sand.” She lives in a world of fallen saints where the father can’t be identified but the mother is always known. And in this postlapsarian world-as-is, purity can be imagined but doesn’t exist: “… beneath the purest heart sings hatred’s free melody.” It is with a dagger guided by hatred that she offers to stab God in his tent.
This is only one trope I have followed in an epic work that veers and jolts us with multiplicity. But one should not be discouraged by these comments. Rosselli’s conclusions, agonies, and contradictions are magnificent. And always, she has grave doubts about the path she’s taken: “I’ve lost the way. You still flounder. I can no longer / remember that I exist,” yet she continues to seek Montale’s Esterina, “who in her solitude / populates the world with savages.” And her passion and love remain a pressing concern: “just one me, just one you—exists charity.” Giving to the other, the exchange, is an act of charity.
Rosselli’s poetic world does all I’ve mentioned, but I’ve withheld a very important point about the book: it is musical. We can read it without being distracted by her purgatorial concerns emotional and philosophical and engage the poem’s voice through her constant use of the leifwort, repetitions that Martin Buber noted are so critical in the Old Testament. These repetitions at the beginning of sentences, in sentences, and so forth, often use the simplest words as repetitions: shall, how, I’m one, I don’t know, I hear, more, find, seek, embrace, and dissipate (and I’ve surely missed a liefwort or two here and there) give the poem the prophetic voice of a singer of her tales. If she contradicts herself, so what—as Whitman said. If death seems an obsession, she has reason, returning to Italy from the victorious United States after World War II without a living parent. Among the glory of Italy’s history, she encountered its fallen buildings and decapitated roads. It is a landscape of loss.
But these facts are simply one of the many rivers within the poem, which at times demands we study what is being stated and at other times insists we let it sing. Last night I realized I hadn’t yet explored the idea of the periphery in this poem, which I consider an oversight. After writing this, I will at my leisure go back over the text and look to draw the hidden into conscious thought, and I will of course be required to overlook, misunderstand, and unintentionally ignore aspects of the hidden that perhaps you will find. I hope so.
The Dragonfly, by Amelia Rosselli. Translated by Roberta Antognini & Deborah Woodard. Seattle, Washington: Entre Rios Books, March 2023. 80 pages. $16.00, paper.
Jeffrey Kahrs is the author of One Hook at a Time: A History of the Deep Sea Fishermen’s Union of the Pacific (Deep Sea Fishermen’s Union, 2015) and a chapbook from Gold Wake Press (2010). A winner of the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Prize in 2012, he co-edited an issue of the Atlanta Review on poetry in Turkey (Spring/Summer 2006, Volume XII, Issue Number 2), and a section of the Turkish translation magazine Çevirmenin Notu on English-language poets in Istanbul (2011). His poetry has appeared in Talisman, Sky Island Journal, What Rough Beast, Subtropics, and other journals. He has also published fiction and nonfiction in the Bosphorus Review of Books, Heavy Feather Review, PN Review, Tikkun, and Virüs, and he has co-translated a variety of notable Turkish poets with Mete Özel. They’ve recently published or have had translations from their upcoming collection of contemporary Turkish women’s poetry accepted for publication in Circumference, Asymptote, and Northwest Review. Kahrs lived ın Istanbul for 18 years. He received his BA in dramatic literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his MA from Boston University in creative writing.
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