Conglomerates

«Bardazzi and Binetti, and ten of their colleagues, have completed a labor of love with the publication of Conglomerates on the occasion of Zanzotto's centennial. This collection of essays ranges from biographical and historical readings to formal analyses of Zanzotto's experiments with linguistics to accounts of his deep and sophisticated relation to the environment of his native Veneto. Every poet has at least one reigning metaphor for a life's work, and in Zanzotto's case, it is the geologic. The «conglomerates» of the title are those mineral layers of whatever endures – mixed, contorted, eroded, and aggregated under the pressure of time. Conglomerates is a moving tribute to one of the great world poets of the postwar period and an intriguing glimpse into the concerns of contemporary Italian scholarship in poetics.»
(Susan Stewart, Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus, Princeton University)
　
«Among Italy’s vast army of postwar poets, Andrea Zanzotto stands in a category of his own, the way Yves Bonnefoy does in France. Conglomerates does full justice to the complexity, originality, and multidimensionality of Zanzotto’s extraordinary corpus of poems. This impressive collection of essays, superbly edited, probes the underlying lineaments of Zanzotto’s poetics as well as the depths of thought that animate some of his finest poems. A landmark publication.»
(Robert Pogue Harrison, Rosina Pierotti Emeritus Professor of Italian Literature, Stanford University)
　
«The volume Conglomerates: Andrea Zanzotto’s Poetic Clusters brings together twelve essays, divided into four thematic sections, which collectively illuminate the «figurative force» of a conceptual constant present throughout Andrea Zanzotto’s work, from his first collection Dietro il paesaggio (1951) to his books of the new millennium, such as Sovrimpressioni (2001). For this reason, Conglomerates serves as a new and original tool for exploring the universe of this great poet’s writing. The geological concept of «conglomerate», referring to the coexistence of heterogeneous materials, is not only the metaphor that gives the title to Zanzotto’s final volume (Conglomerati, 2009), but, as a linguistic practice, it informs his entire oeuvre and reflects a materialistic vision of poetic creation.»
(Emanuele Zinato, Professor of Contemporary Italian Literature, University of Padua)
　
In the rich and diverse landscape of twentieth-century Western poetry, Andrea Zanzotto’s work emerges as one of the most peculiar bodies of verse – a singular testament to intellectual rigour and stylistic innovation. To Zanzotto, poetry transcends language’s bounds, offering a unique alphabet to probe the world.
Conglomerates: Andrea Zanzotto’s Poetic Clusters celebrates Zanzotto's legacy by investigating his vast oeuvre, spanning from Dietro il paesaggio (1951) up to Conglomerati (2009). Each essay in this collection uncovers new facets of Zanzotto’s poetic universe, from lyric theory to environmental humanities. Zanzotto’s poetry becomes a lens through which to explore anthropology, cinema studies, environmental studies and psychoanalysis. Through in-depth textual analyses, contributors unveil the interconnectedness and evolution of Zanzotto’s poetry.
Within their thematic conglomerates — Form, Thought, Wound, and Nature — the essays collected in this volume vertically navigate Zanzotto’s poetic landscape. From exploring his stylistic inventiveness to exploring questions of mourning, language and nature, each section offers a fresh insight into Zanzotto’s poetry.