Alan Williamson

Jeanne Foster and Alan Williamson

19 OCTOBER 2017 — thursday

Poetry Flash presents a reading by poet-translators Jeanne Foster and Alan Williamson, from their new co-translation of Italian poet Bianca Tarozzi, The Living Theatre, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)


MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Jeanne Foster and Alan Williamson will be reading from their co-translation, from the Italian, of The Living Theatre by Bianca Tarozzi, the first U.S. publication of the celebrated Italian poet. The collection is a journey through the poet's childhood memories of the difficult conditions of World War II under Mussolini and mid-century changes that changed Italian life, especially for women. Bianca Tarozzi is an acclaimed Italian poet whose many books of poems have received her country's highest literary honors; she is also author of a novel, Una luce settle (A Subtle Light), and she is the translator of Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, James Merrill, Richard Wilbur, A.E. Housman, Denise Levertov, and Louise Glück into Italian.
Jeanne Foster's most recent collection of poems is Goodbye, Silver Sister; previous collections include Great Horned Owl and A Blessing of Safe Travel, which won the Quarterly Review of Literature Poetry Award. She translated twenty-five poems by Juan Ramon Jimenez in Instants of Faith, and she is co-editor of Appetite: Food as Metaphor.

Alan Williamson's books of poems include Presence, The Muse of Distance, Love and the Soul, Res Publica, and The Pattern More Complicated: New and Selected Poems. His many books of criticism include Pity the Monsters: The Political Vision of Robert Lowell, Introspection and Contemporary Poetry, Eloquence and Mere Life, Almost a Girl: Male Writers and Female Identification, and Westernness: A Meditation. His other several translations from Italian include a complete version of Pavese's Death Will Come and Look at Me with Your Eyes. Among his honors are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.