"What a joy to have this new translation of Ungaretti, a great lyric poet so masterly translated by Geoffrey Brock. I will buy any book of poetry that Brock has translated. He is simply that good. But it is especially clear here, in the pages of Allegria, where the shortish lines test the translator's ability to deliver nuance with light touch, precision, and almost Mozartian grace. The poems themselves praise the fleeting moment in the middle of crisis, praise the spark of tenderness in the time of misfortune, praise the breadcrumbs of rememberings in the hungriest of times, when no one remembers and everyone zigzags around the room, around the street, around one's heart. This book will give you 'a momentary stay against confusion.' It is a beautiful gift." -- Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

"In their comparative abstraction, melancholy timbre and interest in the passing of time, Ungaretti's early poems are in the tradition of Leopardi ... his decisive novelty in Italian - the tiny lines, the absence of punctuation, the consequent focus on each individual word - owes more to the stimulus of Mallarmé and Apollinaire ... His crystalline poems often emerged from a process of cutting; in his work ... the placing of words has an almost pictorial suggestiveness." -Matthew Reynolds, London Review of Books

"Ungaretti's poetry, born in the ordeal of World War I and its trenches ... marked a turning point in modern Italian literature." -Glauco Cambon

"Ungaretti purged the language of all that was but ornament, of all that was too approximate for the precise tension of his line. Through force of tone and sentiment, and a syntax stripped to its essential sinews, he compelled words to their primal power." -Allen Mandelbaum

"One of the most authentic poets of Western Europe." -T. S. Eliot