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NONFICTION: A Place for Noah, Josh Greenfeld · Evita: First Lady, John Barnes · Ezra Pound in Italy, edited by Gianfranco Ivancich, photographs by Vittorugo Contino · First Person Rural, Noel Perrin · People of the Lake, Richard E. Leakey and Roger Lewin · The Gulag Archipelago III, Alexander Solzhenitsyn · The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen
This book arrives like a packet of snapshots long lost in the mail. In 1968, some four years before his death, Poet Ezra Pound agreed to accompany an Italian photographer on a tour of the locales that had inspired him during the writing of the Pisan Cantos 23 years earlier. The freedom to roam was ironic, for when Pound had composed these poems he had not been free to travel anywhere. He was incarcerated in the U.S. Army Disciplinary Training Center in Pisa, charged with treason for making speeches over Rome radio in support of Mussolini's regime...
...pictorial record of Pound's unsentimental journey through old memories and older landmarks makes for intriguing viewing on several levels. First there are the sites themselves. Although a few of his shots smack of artiness, Photographer Vittorugo Contino is usually content to let Pisa, Verona and especially the stones of Venice speak for themselves. His black-and-white photography starkly captures the Venetian redolence of intrigue, history and decay...
Next there are the accompanying excerpts and snippets from the Pisan Can tos, reproduced in Pound's handwriting. Good poetry should stand on its own feet, but Pound's presents a special case. Although as a young man he campaigned tirelessly for the sharpest possible image expressed in the fewest possible words, his later poems grew increasingly allusive, personal and cryptic. Images were still present but encoded. Seeing what Pound saw before it filtered through his mind helps break that code. Sometimes the pictures simply amplify the words. Two pages of dark, roiling skyscape follow lines on Pisan...
Finally there are the rare, unsettling views of Pound himself. Unlike Yeats, Joyce and Eliot, the great modernists whom he coached and championed, Pound never prepared a public face. Even at 83, he remained unsmiling and ill at ease in front of the camera, although he had come to look like the personification of an aging bard. His unruly hair had whitened into a mane, and his face bore lines and wrinkles beyond the mere ravages of time. In "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (1920) Pound had praised "the obscure reveries of the inward gaze." As these pictures prove, it became...