Traveling in the Gait of a Fox

Lisa A. Dickson is a freelance writer living in Guelph, Ontario.

In her collection, Maraini presents a dreamlike vision of the traveler,
the short vignettes and longer poems combining to represent the rhythms
of departures and arrivals and the suspensions of long journeys. The
voice is the restless one of the nomad, whose repeated departures always
contain the “certainty of return.”

Maraini is at her best in the vignettes, depicting scenes glimpsed
through the window of a moving vehicle or observed from a seat in a
station. It is in these moments that the tension between waiting and
motion crystallizes in the rhythm of anticipation and loss.

Traveling in the Gait of a Fox is thought-provoking and original. Genni
Gunn’s fine translation from the Italian preserves both the restless
rhythms of Maraini’s staccato lines and the dreamlike quality of her
imagery.