From the Unreached Let Perception Radiate (Italian Literature)

Domingo Notaro’s poems struggle to fix an innocent gaze on a contemporary world that appears more and more fraught with inhumanity and cruelty. They explore themes of exile, fertility, the human body’s connection to the wider cosmos, and the corrupting influence of power. Often literally scattered across the page, the poems compel the reader to become an active participant in a quest for sense and meaning. “Halfway between lucid vision and prophetic hallucination, Notaro’s poems seem to lean over the edge of an infinite vacuum―terrifying, at times, like the undifferentiated darkness of an Hegelian night, or overwhelmingly beautiful like the azure depth of a blue sky.”

Domingo Notaro, painter, poet, sculptor, was born in Palermiti, in Calabria. He moved to Argentina in 1949, where he studied painting, sculpture and music. He has lived in Rome since 1961 and since 1958 has been exhibiting works throughout the world. In 1965 his work was exhibited alongside works by Chagall, Dufy, Leger, Modigliani, and Picasso at the Guggenheim Muesum in New York.

Notaro has published several books of poetry: I miei piedi sono radici d’aria (My feet are roots of air), D’ésili esìli che questo tempo impone (Of exile exiles these times impose), Libero d’esser (Free to be), E-le-menti delle parole (The mind-elements of words), as well as Arte e poesia (Art and poetry). In 2008 he was awarded First Prize at the International Poetry Award, Riviera dei Marmi.

Irish by birth, Italian by adoption, Kay McCarthy is a musician and aspirant polyglot. A graduate of the National University of Ireland, Galway, and Rome’s Sapienza University, she is a language teacher and translator.

Enrica Maria Ferrara (Ph.D., Reading, UK) lectures in Italian Studies at Trinity College Dublin and has published widely in the field of Italian and Comparative Literature. Among her most recent publications are a monograph on Italo Calvino and the theater (Calvino e il teatro. Storia di una passione rimossa, Peter Lang: Oxford, Bern, 2011) and a volume on the interaction between theatrical and narrative discourses in twentieth-century Italian literature (Il realismo teatrale nella narrativa del Novecento: Vittorini, Pasolini, Calvino, Firenze: Firenze University Press, 2014).