Passenger: Selected Poems

Alan Thomas is a professor of English at the University of Toronto.

This bilingual text presents the work of a Milanese poet who came into prominence in the early sixties as one of a group of subversive newcomers published under the title I novissimi. Porta continues to be an avant-garde writer in Italy, and evidently an inspiration to Italo-Canadians associated with Guernica Editions. The translator, Pasquale Verdiccio, provides an introduction in which he implies that Porta has adopted a post-modernist questioning attitude to language. Readers coming to Porta’s work for the first time will, however, be impressed by its plain poetic virtues, notably the easy conversational poise and fluidity of phrase employed in presenting some startling surrealist images and structurings of situations.