The Italian Visitor

From the opening poem, an extended elegy for the Cold War's ambivalent mix of irresponsibility and prosperity, to a concluding short memoir of Robert Lowell, The Italian Visitor is a book about memory. The title sequence, an account of a 1940s' childhood, unravels time by placing Grey Gowrie's eight-year-old self in fictional relationship with another poetic hero, Eugenio Montale. The Italian visited bankrupt, utilitarian Britain in 1948, in his early fifties. There are love songs from...
More Description

From the opening poem, an extended elegy for the Cold War's ambivalent mix of irresponsibility and prosperity, to a concluding short memoir of Robert Lowell, The Italian Visitor is a book about memory. The title sequence, an account of a 1940s' childhood, unravels time by placing Grey Gowrie's eight-year-old self in fictional relationship with another poetic hero, Eugenio Montale. The Italian visited bankrupt, utilitarian Britain in 1948, in his early fifties. There are love songs from the Portuguese, a ballad about the birth of Israel and elegiac poems for those districts of London now occupied mainly by overseas tycoons. Gowrie has also included a selection of the occasional verses he wrote in the years when poetry left him.