Poetry

Spooring, Unsolicited Press, 2020

Part transposed Basho heading south not north, part site specific artist loosing language from the material world’s medias res, Patrick Barron’s Spooring is a caress down the spine of the Apennines, weaving its way into song. Both travelogue and commonplace book, a landscape of quotations and a quotation of landscape, this major long poem samples the silence of ancient rock, improbably preserved alpine forest, the glinting eyes of our human and nonhuman kin. Sit back weary reader/traveller—your guide is ready to sing a mountain song, an incomparable melodia dolce to take you to “that place / within / pacings’ / meditation.”  —Stephen Collis

Patrick Barron’s Spooring is a radical act of attention. In sinuous poetry and lucid rushes of prose, he tracks the Apennines in vivid granularity, pulling us forward to the next crumbling farmhouse, methane pipeline sign, or meal shared with a stranger.  A polyphony of shelter and exposure, love and degradation, isolation and strange fellowship, his hybrid form is seduced by the berm and rooted the genius of the body, from “dust-caressed rocks” to insects who “spawn across the yawning/ sidereal stone expanse.”  “Everything here/so precarious” he tells us, and yet with a “a little bit of sweat,” we can learn to trace “a bliss that so playfully/painfully/ scampers off/again and/again.”  —Karen Leona Anderson

The sharp energy of this poem, as it roams Italian mountains, calls us to our senses – as well as to sensory delight in a world of cicadas, juniper, barrelling clouds, the ‘taste / of furzy space’. This is also a social, peopled landscape, full of signs, its many rhythms reflected in cuts and swerves through poetry, images and prose. Footnotes, inventively deployed as a parallel stream of attention, take the form of ‘Roads grafted /onto other roads’ that hook the route of the poem into the multiple universes of other texts, so that the impression is of travelling sideways, outwards and through one dimension and into others. It’s in these traces of interlocking lives, and in the looping paths of understanding between them, that Spooring transforms images of rural locality, discovering the potential for new collectivities and encounters.  — Zoë Skoulding                                                                    

In the interstices artfully assembled in Patrick Barron’s Spooring, the “smack of the infinite” peeps out with evident appetite and curiosity. Although it appears to be a book, Spooring is less text than textile, interweaving lore, observations, terrestrial coordinates and bibliographic ruminants in a carefully layered fabric all its own, in the manner of riprap. An enthralling journey by a welcoming mind.  — Jed Rasula

Selected Essays and Dialogues by Gianni Celati: Adventures into the Errant Familiar, University College London Press, 2025

A writers’ writer and an extraordinary presence in contemporary literature in Italy, Celati is someone who has yet to receive the recognition he deserves in the English-speaking world. Patrick Barron’s fine and beautifully translated collection of essays and dialogues is therefore especially welcome. [...] The subtitle, Adventures into the errant familiar, is dense with possibilities. The word "errant" would have appealed to Gianni Celati for its multiple meanings, association with wandering knights and sense of redundancy. Indeed, Barron relishes the writer’s adventures in language, which stretch him as both translator and compiler. —Robert Lumley 

An excellent tool…to study and better understand one of the most original and important Italian writers of the last fifty years. —Enrico Vettore

Barron’s volume is a very welcome addition to the field. As the first collection of Gianni Celati’s essays in English translation, the book makes accessible a wide selection of his critical work to an Anglophone audience. —Marina Spunta

Towards the River’s Mouth (Verso la foce), by Gianni Celati, Bloomsbury, 2018

Gianni Celati is one of Italy's principal contemporary authors and one of the world's leading ecological writers. His Towards the River's Mouth, in the crisp and fluid translation by Patrick Barron, explores the deterioration of the physical and social landscapes of the Po Valley. The literary text, consisting of four travel diaries or 'stories of observation,' is accompanied by lucid essays by some of the foremost Italian scholars of the environmental humanities and ecocriticism. —John P. Welle 

Patrick Barron's timely English translation and critical edition of Gianni Celati's Verso la foce is an inspired and remarkable accomplishment. To open this book is like being affectionately escorted along the Po Valley countryside with a group of old friends and simultaneously taking a journey along the misty paths of one's own soul. Barron's informative introduction and the accompanying critical essays skillfully guide us through these multidimensional physical and emotional landscapes. An important and most welcome work. —Enrico Cesaretti 

Largely uncelebrated and mostly unknown, Italy's great river Po and its delta are the backdrop for Gianni Celati's musings about land and life. Here lie reclaimed marshlands alongside abandoned factories where scattered farmhouses disappear behind windblown hedges. We see how this broad river flowing to the sea, braided here and diked there, often abused and always vulnerable, continues to nurture the human spirit. Patrick Barron's sensitive translation joined with critical assessments of Celati's work allow us to explore some of Italy's least beaten pathways. —Marcus Hall

Patrick Barron’s edition gives to an Anglo-American readership not only a translation, but also a collection of many excellent entry points into a text that is apparently simple and familiar, but which in truth, in its own way, is labyrinth-like on account of its almost excess of light and dispersion. In his introduction, Barron underlines the effort that Celati’s writing demands of his readers today, forced to move in space as if we were Hölderlin locked in his tower, and in the opening to the things we perceive coming towards us as we move. —Stefano Colangelo

Haiku for a Season/Haiku per una stagione (with Anna Secco), by Andrea Zanzotto, Chicago, 2012

[H]ere is brilliance in closed spaces--these are profoundly beautiful, heartbreaking poems, in English and Italian. —Grace Cavalieri

Haiku for a Season è un esperimento poetico oltre che il culmine di un lungo percorso letterario, è il ponte che è riuscito ad unire due culture completamente diverse, quella orientale e quella occidentale, dando luogo ad un risultato unico ed irripetibile nel suo genere. —Carolina Perez De Vera

[È] l’ultimo libro dal lui licenziato in vita. Una preziosità assoluta. Alla quale si aggiunge la ristampa (per l’editore Einaudi) di Filò, elegia in dialetto sulla fine del dialetto, del 1976, nato a margine di una collaborazione con Federico Fellini per il film Casanova, corredato pure da una «cantilena» e un «recitativo» composti per la pellicola. Non sono le sole novità che lo riguardano. Altri studi e convegni sulla sua opera sono in cantiere. A dimostrazione che quello che, per Le Monde, è stato nel Secondo Novecento «le plus moderne, plus savant, plus émouvant poète italien» e più volte vicino al Nobel, continua a parlarci. —Marzio Breda

The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto, Chicago, 2007

Now, in [this book], American readers can get a just sense of  [Zanzotto’s] true range and extraordinary originality.  —Eric Ormsby

“What I love here is the sense of a voice directly speaking. Throughout these translations, indeed from early to late, the great achievement seems to be the way they achieve a sense of urgent address.  —Eamon Grennan

Given the importnace of the chiseling of words operated by Zanzotto in all of his poetical works, the translations acquire utter importnace, and the most often succeed completely in rendering Zanzotto's experimental wording in all of its muting and translucent opacity.... Showing an attention in the selection of Zanzotto's works that goes beyond the desire to choose only the poet's most representative texts and follwing, rather, a conceptual thread, Barron succeeds in giving us a volume in which the three ever-shifting elements that constitute the basis of Zanzotto's poetry-—landscape, language, and poetic subjet—are showcased.  —Federica Santini

Barron also has considerable successes with other later poems. This is no mean achievement. since Zanzotto makes linguistic and stylistic free-for-all the staple idiom of much of his subsequent poetry, developing it most fully and satisfyingly in the three volumes of what he called his "pseudo-trilogy." —Peter Hainsworth

Barron's translations foreground the kaleidescopic nature of many of the compositions and the vertiginous highs and lows of a poetic subject caught up in the signifying processes of language which at one moment throw a world into relief, at another seem almost to swallow it up, leaving nothing but empty signs or sounds. —Francesca Southerden-Rossi 

Zanzotto is a major voice in world poetry, one that urgently needs to be heard in the current political and social climate (not least for his profound and consistent engagement with ecological themes). This splendid volume makes that possible. Summing Up: Essential. —Steven Botterill 

Patrick Barron’s deep understanding of Zanzotto’s work—an understanding that stems not only from years of research, but also from a personal relationship and steady dialogue with the poet—is reflected in his choice of the texts, both in poetry and prose; by his excellent introduction; and, most of all, by his excellent translations, which are so insightful as to help even the Italian reader to better understand Zanzotto’s not infrequent obscurities. —Serenella Iovino

Italian Environmental Literature: An Anthology (with Anna Re), Italica, 2003

Patrick Barron and Anna Re have carefully assembled a variety of voices to sing praise and pain about the Italian landscape. Collectively, they give us a fresh look at ancient country and cultures, affirming that there is no single way to see Italian landscape any more than there is just one way to see Mount Fuji. Bless them for this effort. —Gary Paul Nabhan

Nature and culture are both astoundingly complex realms within the small “boot” called the Italian nation, as this most welcome anthology makes clear. —Rebecca West

[T]his remarkable anthology fosters and renews the dialogue between Italian and American literature that has long proven so fruitful, and that has never been more urgent than it is today. —John Elder

This anthology is an explicit invitation to go to the originals to get a taste of their richness and their validity. It’s a little like listening to one’s favorite opera arias: one can listen to them on their own, but they take on all kinds of new colors and warmth when one hears them in the context of the larger works from which they’ve been excerpted. —Franco Borelli

The rich variety of texts in Barron and Re's anthology provides a lively introduction to twentieth-century Italian environmental thought which both students and scholars would find beneficial. —Silvia Ross

[C]onscientious translating can open up brave new worlds, and Barron and Re’s anthology goes a long way in demonstrating that translation is itself a high art form.    —Marcus Hall

Terrain Vague: Interstices at the Edge of the Pale (with Manuela Mariani), Routledge, 2013.

As a cooperative effort to redefine these marginal spaces as a central concept for urban planning and design, the book Terrain Vague presents innovative ways of looking at marginal urban space, and focusing on its positive uses and aspects. It will be of interest to all those wishing to understand our increasingly complex everyday surroundings, from planners, cultural theorists, and academics, to designers and architects. —Anna Grichting 

The book is rich with solutions. They tend to reinforce the “built-in” potential of such spaces to provoke the imagination and creativity not only that of architects but of all who engage with these urban spaces. The book itself seems to embody this dynamism by displaying its metaphors, answers and solutions through creative representations such as poetry and photomontage, appealing prose, crisp and accessible academic writing, architectural visualities, a quote from Žižek, and a colourful collection of places and landscapes and cross-cultural perspectives. This may inspire a more comfortable irreconciliation between and among self, other and habitat in urban places, but for now, definitely daydreams of the sublime from the safe side of the Pale. —Ken Whalen

Contributors range far and wide: English professors mingle with architects, planning and urban designers converse with poets and artists. [...] It is an homage to those geographers and urbanists who try to “look beyond the apparent and easily recognizable” (Tanu Sankalia, 76) and to appreciate that terrain vague may also be a “reflection of a fundamental human need for spontaneous, ephemeral, and renewable dialogue with the mutable community in an open space” (Stanka Radovic, 128). —James Tyner

Debris, detritus, dregs, dross, leftovers, litter, refuse, rummage, waste; what an awful lot of ways to say rubbish! All manner of landfills, dumps, scrapyards and brownfields are needed to cope with so much "garbage language" (Jennifer Scappettone, 148). English provides a rich linguistic landscape of trashy synonyms. Nevertheless, Patrick Barron and Manuela Mariani are determined to add a French term to this heap of junk. Hence, their edited volume, Terrain Vague: Interstices at the Edge of the Pale. —Stuart Burch