Hotel of the Heart: Poems 1997-2001
by Richard Milazzo.

With an Italian translation by Nanni Cagnone.
First edition paperback:  December 2002.
96 pages, with the cover photograph by André Kertész, Martinique, January 1, 1972, and a black and white photograph of the author by Michel Frère on the frontispiece.
7.25 x 4.75 in., printed, sewn and bound in Turin, Italy.
ISBN:  88-88454-06-3.
Published by Night Mail, Pavia, Italy, 2002.

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Written mostly in Paris, Greece, and Italy (the book was published in Italy and is, in fact, accompanied by an Italian translation) during a four-year period, in three, four and five line stanzas, Hotel of the Heart:  Poems 1997-2001 by Richard Milazzo speaks of the soul in extremely disciplined forms.  There is a sadness about this author’s second volume of poetry (his first was Le Violon d’Ingres:  Sunday Poems and Lineations 1993-1996) that seems to reflect a state of mind or being that inheres naturally to the act of writing poetry.

About the poems in Hotel of the Heart, the poet and translator Nanni Cagnone writes:  “The difficult intonations and the distance this introduces are perhaps those of the impassioned-desolate commentator standing alone before an aurora borealis or an interminably congenital sunset.  What we encounter here is the seriousness of poetry.”  In keeping with these sentiments, the cover prints an image by André Kertész of Martinque that shows a shadowy figure behind an opaque glass curtain looking out to sea.  The black and white photograph of the author on the frontispiece, taken by one of the author’s favorite artists, Michel Frère, who was found dead in his early 30s, a suicide, shows the author on the artist’s boat, where he lived and maintained a studio in New York City when he was not living and working in Belgium.  In a poem entitled, “Mycenae,” the poet writes:  “Unlike the charging bull of Knossos / Negotiating the champagne maze / Of clinking glass / The eminence of concrete columns / In drawing rooms // Your ancient Minoan existence now / On rocky crag and precipitous hill / Rain and windswept / Amounts to little more than mere inference / Drawn from unkempt boundary stone!”