Roman Poems is a handsome book, including six photographs of him (one on the cover) with street kids against a background of shacks and housing projects. Whereas the MacAfee/Martinengo selection and mine stressed the longer works, Ferlinghetti and Valenti have concentrated on shorter pieces. There is little overlap in the three books. However, Ferlinghetti and Valenti have offered us a new piece of the puzzle named Pier Paolo Pasolini. A large selection of Pasolini, about half the length of the City Lights edition, appeared my The New Italian Poetry: 1945 to the Present (University of California Press), also in paperback, two years before that. The substantial volume translated by Norman MacAfee and Luciano Martinengo, and published by Random House, came out in a Vintage paperback three years ago. It is not the first time Pasolini's poetry has been available in a paperback English translation. Surely it will increase his American readership. If he were alive today, he would be pleased by the new City Lights edition entitled Roman Poems, translated by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Francesca Valenti. He was enthusiastic about the possibility of his poetry finding a larger audience: he wanted to reach the man in the street, not just the intellectual elite. In the preface to an inexpensive paperback selected poems which came out in 1970, Pasolini eagerly welcomed the "new reader" to his work. Translated by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Francesca Valenti City Lights Books, 1986
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