Finite Intuition – Milo De Angelis
Finite Intuition – Selected Poetry and Prose by Milo De Angelis, translated by Lawrence Venuti / ISBN 9781557130686 / 148-page paperback from Sun & Moon Classics (new copies, but they are from the 1995 first printing and have some signs of wear from age and storage
***
A contemporary of poets such as Tom Raworth of England, Dominique Fourcade of France, and Charles Bernstein of the United States, the Italian poet Milo De Angelis shares many of their writing strategies, including a formal discontinuity, multiple frames of reference, and an ambigious authorial presence. However, there is a reflective lyricism in his poems that sets him apart from these others.
As translator Lawrence Venuti puts it, the writing of De Angelis is “a series of stunning poetic researches that draw on classical literature, existential phenomenology, and psychoanalysis, but rethink them according to the new conceptions of subjectivity and language that underlie the variey of poststructuralisms in contemporary French and Italian culure.” Although De Angelis has some affinities with the Novissimi of the generation preceding him, “he eschews the explicit political engagement…for a poetic discourse that is both deeply personal and densely philosophical.”
Finite Intuition brings together a selection of poems culled from four books, published from 1976 to 1989, and several essays. This overview of De Angelis’s writing is an important addition to the Sun & Moon Classics Series, and a fascinating introduction to a major Italian writer.
