Furnished Rooms

Poetry. Anyone who knows anything about poetry written in English between the two World Wars knows the name Carnevali, but almost no on knows the words of the wonderful work he wrote, as he only published one book in his lifetime, A Hurried Man (1925). To this day Carnevali remains an almost mythological figure. He and his work resist categorization as he had a conflictual relationship with so many things: Modernism, America, and Italy among them. He believed that he "belonged to the nineteenth century more than to any other, perhaps entirely, insanely to the nineteenth century." The poems published here--the poems originally published in A Hurried Man--are a triumph: they take us from New York to Chicago and his illness and then to his return to Italy and those painful years in a hospital room. "Job Junior," one of his essays, has been included here as a preface to his work; it provides an understanding of his poetics.