All Over

by Gabriele Tinti, Nicholas Benson (Translator)

All over is a collection of epic songs, of epinician odes for our day. The heroes praised are boxers, men the author identifies as the last able to truly astound, to induce awe. These epinician odes on Pindaric models are transformed in the making. What they sing about is not victory but defeat. The hero, the boxer, is deprived the possibility of attaining true victory through the gods obliging and favorable presence a limitation that never pertained in antiquity. This is a fragile hero. An all-too human human. He is a simple boxer. Nothing but a man. The epinician odes, therefore, end up being direct, and matter-of-fact, in their style and content. They wind up as epigraphs, tragedies in verse form that narrate the real exploits of workday heroes, even if the resulting events are exceptional, moving us to weep, and to feel great admiration and compassion."

74 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 2014

About the author

Gabriele Tinti is an Italian poet and writer.
His work is focused on the theme of death and suffering and is mostly composed in the form of ekphrastic and epigrammatic poetry. In 2018 his ekphrastic poetry project ‘Ruins’ was awarded the Premio Montale with a ceremony at the National Roman Museum in Palazzo Altemps.
His  poems  have been performed  by  actors  including Willem Dafoe, Abel  Ferrara,  Kevin  Spacey and Franco Nero. His recent publications are "Ruins" (Eris Press, London); "Bleedings"  (La Nave di Teseo, Milan; Contra Mundum Press, New York) and "Confessions" (with Andres Serrano - Eris Press, London).
In the current year, he was appointed as the first ‘poet in residence’ of the National Roman Museum.

Reviews

[m4ltose · Rating 3 out of 5]

I may be too little of a poetry fan, coming in touch with the subject mainly through German school education's love for Goethe and the likes, as well as reading Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot and some Haiku once or twice.
So I only really connect with poetry if it makes me feel something. And "It's all over", the quasi-titular piece of this, definitely did that when I stumbled upon a reading of the poem on YouTube.

The start-and-stop phrasing, often just one-word lines and simple words draw a striking vision of the box fight Tinti describes: Primal, both opponents acting moment to moment, constantly on the edge. It feels like it's far less about boxing and rather a case study of human behavior in extreme situations.

Sadly, the rest of the poems didn't hit quite the same. They feel too disconnected for me, but once again: When it comes to poetry, I'm really not well-versed. So, for the casual reader, 3 stars.

[Michael Porter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is intense like a fight, crude, and with harrowing pace. Chants about boxer's deaths, their dramas and disperation, their courage and their fears.