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Chinese Apples: New and Selected Poems
This selection of W. S. Di Piero’s poems, covering eight individual collections over the last quarter century and offering fifteen strong new poems, is a chance to savor the career of a poet enthralled by the seductive music of life as it is lived. Here are Di Piero’s consuming the pull of faith and the suspicion of transcendence; urban worlds and the mysterious jazz of street language; desire and sexual need and love and loss, everything marked by what one early poem calls “the bruise of chance.” Through it all, Di Piero delivers what he has called, in William James’s phrase, “the hard, bright particulars of physical existence.”
No poet is more visceral; these poems carry the sparkling tension and urgency of an artist who does not write or live intellectually, but locally. Di Piero’s sensibility seems to spring from the mood on the streets of San Francisco or float down from the flung-open shutters in his ancestors’ Italian villages; the economy of his language has its source in his native South Philly, where “When I was young, they taught us not to ask. / Accept what’s there . . . Brick homes, Your Show of Shows, / the mothball fleet and flaring oilworks.”
“Poetry exists not to simplify our sense of life and death but to absorb and express its complexities and mixed tones,” Di Piero has written. Throughout this volume, those tones are at play, as this essential poet squares up in front of experience and all it brings.
No poet is more visceral; these poems carry the sparkling tension and urgency of an artist who does not write or live intellectually, but locally. Di Piero’s sensibility seems to spring from the mood on the streets of San Francisco or float down from the flung-open shutters in his ancestors’ Italian villages; the economy of his language has its source in his native South Philly, where “When I was young, they taught us not to ask. / Accept what’s there . . . Brick homes, Your Show of Shows, / the mothball fleet and flaring oilworks.”
“Poetry exists not to simplify our sense of life and death but to absorb and express its complexities and mixed tones,” Di Piero has written. Throughout this volume, those tones are at play, as this essential poet squares up in front of experience and all it brings.
- GenresPoetry
272 pages, Hardcover
First published February 6, 2007
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57 people want to read
About the author
W.S. Di Piero
32 books7 followersWilliam Simone Di Piero was born in 1945 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and earned degrees from St. Joseph’s College and San Francisco State College. A poet, essayist, art critic, and translator, Di Piero has taught at institutions such as Northwestern University, Louisiana State University, and Stanford, where he is professor emeritus of English and on faculty in the prestigious Stegner Poetry Workshop. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001, Di Piero was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2012.
Di Piero’s poetry is known for its gritty realism. Populated with characters and settings reminiscent of the South Philadelphia neighborhood of his boyhood and the Italian-American working-class families he grew up with, Di Piero’s poetry frequently makes use of colloquial language and diction.
An award-winning translator of Italian poetry, Di Piero’s first translation, Giacomo Leopardi's Pensieri, was nominated for a National Book Award. Other translations include Sandro Penna's This Strange Joy, which received the Academy of American Poets Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Award, Leonardo Sinisgalli's The Ellipse (1982) and Night of Shooting Stars (2011), and a translation of Euripides’s Ion.
W.S. Di Piero has won numerous honors and awards for his work, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund. He lives in San Francisco.
Di Piero’s poetry is known for its gritty realism. Populated with characters and settings reminiscent of the South Philadelphia neighborhood of his boyhood and the Italian-American working-class families he grew up with, Di Piero’s poetry frequently makes use of colloquial language and diction.
An award-winning translator of Italian poetry, Di Piero’s first translation, Giacomo Leopardi's Pensieri, was nominated for a National Book Award. Other translations include Sandro Penna's This Strange Joy, which received the Academy of American Poets Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Award, Leonardo Sinisgalli's The Ellipse (1982) and Night of Shooting Stars (2011), and a translation of Euripides’s Ion.
W.S. Di Piero has won numerous honors and awards for his work, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund. He lives in San Francisco.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 2, 2017
Piero is one of those poets who refreshes everyday language in deceptively precise ways. Full of language of Philly streets and yet subtle the observation of character, Piero is a surprisingly diverse poet and this collect makes that abundantly clear.
Read
November 25, 2010"Someday I'll smoke Camels, my father's brand,
then Gauloises to prove I'm stronger than him
in burning whatever's inside that won't sleep."
-"Smoke" from The Only Dangerous Thing (1984)
"I thought the child
hooting at a ruff of fallen leaves
would shovel them at me like a war
or bridal game, but the armfuls scooped
above her head rattled down,
wrinkled flames on her shoulders,
and she tested its atomized perfume,
clapping her orange mittens, fall's
first child, hollering
Come down here, you!
That's when I felt most alive
inside matter's reechy stuff,
unseen, intensely real."
-"All in One Day" from Brother Fire (2004)
I envy this man's vision and vocabulary. From "crummy" to "febrile" to "dirigible," all his words are equally charged, all trenchant of quiddity. He enacts what Valery declared: "A poet's function--do not be startled by this remark--is not to experience the poetic state: that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others." And: "The man of genius is the one who infuses genius into me."
then Gauloises to prove I'm stronger than him
in burning whatever's inside that won't sleep."
-"Smoke" from The Only Dangerous Thing (1984)
"I thought the child
hooting at a ruff of fallen leaves
would shovel them at me like a war
or bridal game, but the armfuls scooped
above her head rattled down,
wrinkled flames on her shoulders,
and she tested its atomized perfume,
clapping her orange mittens, fall's
first child, hollering
Come down here, you!
That's when I felt most alive
inside matter's reechy stuff,
unseen, intensely real."
-"All in One Day" from Brother Fire (2004)
I envy this man's vision and vocabulary. From "crummy" to "febrile" to "dirigible," all his words are equally charged, all trenchant of quiddity. He enacts what Valery declared: "A poet's function--do not be startled by this remark--is not to experience the poetic state: that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others." And: "The man of genius is the one who infuses genius into me."
May 16, 2008
A rich, feeling-full, and unusually varied career retrospective, from a badly undervalued and altogether marvelous poet. DiPiero is respectful of form and history, yet he also has the grasp of sensual immediacy that distinguishes the best of the Beats. See especially the two later sequences having to do with remembrances of and revisits to Italian-American South Philly (on the frayed edge of African-American ditto).
August 7, 2008
Simply beautiful. I will buy this anthology for my personal collection.
September 8, 2007
a gift from a dear friend...
Favorite poem: Night-Lights Providence Amtrak Station
Thank you GM
Favorite poem: Night-Lights Providence Amtrak Station
Thank you GM
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews