Petrarch: Songs and Sonnets: A Reading

The great 14th-century Italian’s lyric and love poems are presented as living poetry in Kilmer’s powerful and moving versions. His selection convinces us that, as he puts it, ‘Petrarch deserves to be valued as a real man, a careful thinker, a good poet.’ Free in form yet holding close to the central impulses of Petrarch’s inspiration, Kilmer’s ‘readings’ in this bilingual edition present Petrarch as a confessional poet, but one who is a humane moralist of startling honesty. This is an expanded edition of Songs and Sonnets from Laura’s Lifetime , published by Anvil Press in 1980. It adds a selection of the poems Petrarch wrote after Laura’s death.