Carlota Caulfield,
The Book of Giulio Camillo
Translated by Mary G. Berg and Pietro Civitareale.
With an Introduction by John Goodby.
(Poetry)

Published by Eboli Poetry In English / Spanish/ Italian Softcover, perfect bound 108 pages ISBN: 0-9711391-4-8 List price: $12.95 Buy it from Amazon.com   Or, if you don't want to use your credit card, Download Order Form (HTML) - (PDF)

About the Book

"The Book of Giulio Camillo is a sequence of haunting incantatory poems by Carlota Caulfield, beautifully translated by Mary G. Berg. Writing about loss and memory and the redemption that comes of confronting the wound, Caulfield summons up the inner life in the dream music of the
inexpressible."

--Chana Bloch, author of The Past Keeps Changing

In Classical times, Memory (Mnemosyne) was fabled to be the mother of the Muses. Frances A. Yates' The Art of Memory traces the Platonic sources of Giulio Camillo's 16th-century Theater of Memory in which "memory is not...one part of the art of rhetoric; memory...is the groundwork of the whole." In these haunting, enigmatic, impeccably modern poems--the Seven Pillars not of Wisdom but of Memory--Memory functions as the key to Carlota Caulfield's complex subjectivity. These three-lined, haiku-like poems resemble the frames of a film we do not quite remember but cannot forget. They usher us into a primal world in which "THE MIND'S TRACE / is defined in seeds filled with water;" in which

AIR, FIRE AND WATER
are round creatures,
a triad that can be anything.

What Yates writes of Giordano Bruno is true here as well: El Libro de Giulio Camillo, like memory itself, is "a most profound discipline...an 'inner writing' of mysterious significance."

--Jack Foley, author of O Powerful Western Star, Poetry & Art in California

Carlota Caulfield's project of reclamation of neglected, and sometimes not so neglected lives continues in her El Libro de Giulio Camillo / The Book of Giulio Camillo / Il Libro di Giulio Camillo. As her "Note in Homage" informs us, Camillo was one of the most famous men of the Italian Renaissance, renowned for the invention of a "theatre of memory" into which a single spectator would insert his head, to be presented with a view from the stage, as it were, of seven rows of spectators'seats. "It included," Caulfield's note continues, "all branches of knowledge and a method to memorize them as the 'full wisdom of the universe' was presented in 'seven times seven doorways.'" This strange and haunting apparatus, sounding to us like a cross between a virtual reality headset and an image out of de Chirico, is translated into the medium of verse by Caulfield's sevenfold sections of seven tercets which enact, rather than describe, Camillo's theatre. In limpid and piercing verses, Caulfield (superbly served here by her translators, Mary G. Berg and Pietro Civitareale) moves her narrating voice - detached in the manner of Beckett or Borges - from an initial state of dessicated receptivity through the several senses and elements as defined by Renaissance cosmology. As ever in Caulfield's work there is an insistence upon the body both as physical presence and as a mode of knowledge.

It is marvelous, yet not an easy work, compelling the reader as it does to confront the theatre of his or her own memories, to "meditate with pure water from mouth to ear" until the memory of some other falls "like warm paper onto warm paper," briefly escaping the prison of the self, of subjectivity, "and so the poem is written."

--John Goodby, author of Irish Poetry Since 1950. From Stillness into History