Tide of Tides

“Paolo Totaro’s Collected Poems were published in 2012. Taken together, the Collected Poems constituted the work of more than sixty years, spanning the period from 1950 to 2011—‘all my adult life,’ as Totaro wrote in his foreword. Except that there was, and there is, more life to come, and with it a startling concentration of poems. In the thirteen years since his Collected Poems, Totaro has written as much poetry as he did in the sixty preceding years. This new book collates that remarkable yield.

In so doing, this book belies the preoccupation of many of the poems with infirmity and impermanence. For every presentiment of mortality or every shift of feeling towards resignation, there is a counterpoise, perhaps an observation or intuition or aphorism, or simply an expression of mood, which refreshes the poet’s sensitivity to a vital spark. For all the eclecticism of this volume—Totaro’s wit, the breadth of his intellectual interests and the variety of his expressive modes are undiminished—its chief motive is an insistence on life for life’s sake.”

From the Introduction by Theodore Ell