Shadows Burning

by W.S. Di Piero

Shadows Burning is a poetry book that wrestles with its angels—domestic love, fruition and desiccation, the passion for words that will suffice at bringing to light and shadow ground between the inner and outer life. 

Genres: Poetry

61 pages, Hardcover

First published November 22, 1995

About the author

William 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.

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The breeze, our bedroom window,
the dark, and her breath
tiding at my ear.
The leaves of the plant
whose name I haven't learned
stirring at that sound,
the pitched lift and fall,
while the moon's dense light
pebbles through the leaves
onto her pillow and face,
writing the motion, unselfed.
Wake and tell me, tell me.