The Dimension of Loss

The Dimension of Loss is an extended and tragic reflection on that inescapable experience, evoking the loss of familiar places and of homes lived in, and also the loss of hopes, of affection, of meaning, of desire. In two long monologues from Enzo Lamartora's volume It was (published in Italy in 2017), extensively revised by the author and translated by Michael Palma, we come to know two women whose family histories of anguish and emptiness have left them with a "feeling of loss / that enfolds us, that permeates us, / like a fog in the darkness of a forest." Shot through with emotional intensity, rich in images both concrete and fantastic that suggest a battle scene viewed through the eyes of a child, the poems form what the author describes as "the rough draft of a life and a poem that might have been."