Brief Homage to Pluto and Other Poems collects forty-five poems by Fabio Pusterla, one of the most distinguished Italian-language poets writing today. Born in Switzerland and resident in Italy, Pusterla engages the pressing moral concerns of his age and excavates the hidden realities of our concrete world. These are poems of disquieting Alpine landscapes and rift zones, filled with curious fauna, lanced with troubling memories, built “from the bottom, from the margins, from outside” the mainstream.
Pusterla is the author of eight critically acclaimed books of poetry and has received several major literary prizes. Selected and translated by Will Schutt, himself an award-winning poet, this volume draws from Pusterla’s six most recent collections to capture a wide range of the poet’s work. With English translations and Italian originals on facing pages, Brief Homage to Pluto and Other Poems deftly introduces one of Europe’s most ambitious, imaginative, and humane poets to English-speaking readers.
Awards and Recognition
- Winner of the Joseph Tusiani Italian Translation Prize, Calandra Italian American Institute
Fabio Pusterla is a prolific poet, essayist, and translator, most notably of the work of Philippe Jaccottet. His honors include the Swiss Schiller Prize, the Gottfried Keller-Preis, and the Premio Napoli for lifetime achievement. Will Schutt is the author of Westerly, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and translator of My Life, I Lapped It Up: Selected Poems of Edoardo Sanguineti, among other works from Italian. For his translations of Fabio Pusterla’s poetry he received the Raiziss/de Palchi Award from the Academy of American Poets.
"The skillfully translated first English-language edition of Pusterla’s work spans landscapes, memories, dreams, wars, and the ordinariness of daily life, energetically rendering a voice of striking attention, one willing to notice near-constant juxtaposition. . . . Pusterla’s voice is a kindly light in the midst of darkness."—Publishers Weekly
"As with Leopardi, in spite of the poet’s despair, it is the poetry that brings its own consolation. No doubt Pusterla would agree with W.H. Auden that, as a poet, all he has is a voice or, to quote his own beautifully cadenced and defiant words at the end of ‘Landscape’: ‘E le parole: nessuno adesso me le ruberà,’/ ‘And words: now no one will rob me of them.'"—David Cooke, The High Window
“Pusterla has long been one of the most singular and intriguing poets writing in Italian. I’ve admired his work for decades now, and I’m delighted to have, at last—thanks to translator Will Schutt, a brilliant poet in his own right, who prefaces his resonant versions with a stellar introduction—a volume in English that does justice to Pusterla’s ‘wayfaring’ voice and ‘rift zone’ vision.”—Geoffrey Brock, editor of The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry: An Anthology
“Pusterla’s vision is like mountain air. That way of seeing, neither sentimental nor heartless, comes across in Schutt’s clear-eyed translations of Pusterla’s masterful and often intricately detailed poems.”—Mark Jarman, author of The Heronry: Poems and Dailiness: Essays on Poetry
