Poetic Notebook 1974–1977
, one of the final volumes assembled by Eugenio Montale before his death, shows the last act of the twentieth-century master to be one of splendid negation.
evokes a magnificent savagery, an attack on the poet himself and on the nihilistic squalor that he observes around him. An old man, Montale remembers his youth and recalls the dead. At times he seems to wonder if he himself is dead. And so his is a grim majesty, a new kind of poetry that faces the void: “She’s lied too often, now let darkness, / void, nothingness fall on her page. / Rely on this, my scribbling friend: / Trust the darkness when the light lies.”