Glasfryn Project

Angela Gardner: ‘The Painful Abyss’ is a long piece I wrote using mutations or springboards from Dante’s Paradise and Inferno in the original Italian. It was written while I was learning Italian (I still am) so it very much includes misunderstandings and meanderings from the original text.  I allowed it to lose itself in the dark wood and become an unfaithful translation. At the time of writing the Iraq war was beginning and then in progress. Even at a distance and mediated by news reports I was incensed. We marched and nothing came of it, wars keep going, mutating and springboarding as part of the military industrial capitalist endeavour.

 

To read the poem: The Painful Abyss

ANGELA GARDNER is a Welsh/Australian artist and poet. Her verse novel The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette is published by Shearsman Books, it is a UK National Poetry Day recommendation for 2021. Her recent poetry collections are Some Sketchy Notes on Matter, Recent Work Press, Canberra 2020 and The Told World, Shearsman Books, 2014.  Poems have been published in The Yale Review and West Branch USA; Blackbox Manifold, The Long Poem and Tears in the Fence, UK; Plumwood Mountain, Westerley, Southerly, and Cordite, Australia.

 

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View all: Issue 16 Dante Page 3, Junction Box | Posted on 15 Nov 2021 |