Poems from Italy, co-edited with William Jay Smith, was published by New Rivers Press, 1985.

In a useful bilingual format and handsomely illustrated with Venetian Renaissance woodcuts, Poems from Italy presents seven centuries of Italian poetry along with verse translations spanning a similar period of the English language.

The giants of Italian literature—Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Leopardi—are all well represented together with the Nobel Prize-winning twentieth-century poets Salvatore Quasimodo and Eugenio Montale and the younger poets Mario Luzi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Nelo Risi, Rocco Scotellaro, and others. Translations—often little known ones—by Chaucer, Spenser, Wyatt, Surrey, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Rossetti, and Longfellow accompany the work of modern British and American poet-translators, including Ezra Pound, Richard Wilbur, James Merrill, Charles Tomlinson, Barbara Howes, Marya Zaturenska, John Heath-Stubbs, Edwin Morgan, Gavin Ewart, Seamus Heaney, William Jay Smith, and Dana Gioia.

Richard Wilbur writes: "This unique and generous anthology offers us the poetic genius of Italy from St. Francis' great Cantico down to very recent times, representing each poet and period substantially and with discernment. For every reader, as for me, there will be delectable discoveries, both in the poems chosen and in the accompanying English translations. The latter, done by many hands from Chaucer to the present, are generally of a high order and frequently splendid. One gains from this book a sharpened sense of the continuities and changes of Italian poetry, and of its powerful, sustained influence on poetic performance in English. The test as a whole is full of fascinating relationships—as when, to give but one example, we find Michelangelo's tribute to Dante expertly translated by Longfellow in that sonnet-form which Petrarch, through Wyatt and Surrey, taught us to make our own. Mr. Smith and Mr. Gioia are to be thanked."

"Other famous translators include Lord Byron, Leigh Hunt, Sir Thomas Wyatt, William Wordsworth, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Among contemporaries we find Richard Wilbur, Robert Lowell, Isabella Gardner, Charles Wright, Charles Tomlinson, and the editors, William Jay Smith and Dana Gioia. All excellent. Indeed, I know of no other language served so well by its translators. I have only two quibbles. The excellent introduction could be longer and the book even bigger. A wonderful feast!"

— Victor Contoski, Prairie Schooner

The Italian poets represented here, about half of whom wrote before 1700, were born between 1182 and 1923; their translators cover a century or so less. All the work is set out in a nice straight chronological line-just over four \ hundred well-printed pages.

— Elizabeth Macklin, The New Yorker