Magrelli writes with a capacious grasp of the enormous, still-to-be discovered potentialities of the great treasure house of Italian. His poetry is a soliloquy written with a pencil and small notebook during the latest and most silent hours of the night. It is poetry that looks at itself, but at the sight of its thought, vanishes. Here, a great deal of precious cargo has made it intact to the shores of the English-speaking world, and we are enriched by the arrival of such rich, strange and new matter.