Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
A collection of longer poems spanning the last two decades, whose urgent motive is a formal, personal and ideological meditation on the Roman alphabet, that seemingly most casual and chaotic of all necessities. Vangelisti's Alphabets begins with "Los Alephs" (1986) and "Alephs Again" (1988), both using 26 alphabetically organized stanzas; and moves to an aaabcedarium or alphabetical history, "A Life" (1991), as well as the bestiary and biography of friends and literary influences, "The Simple Life" (1993) The book concludes with the double-alphabet (52 part) musical sequence, "Rhum" (1995), a meditation on number and evil.