Sylvia Plath & Amelia Rosselli

February 11th is a date I cannot forget, being the death anniversary of two women poets I truly love. Sylvia Plath's death makes of her an iconic martyr immolating herself on the altar of Pain. Reading about her death and her last few acts before sealing the kitchen's door inspired one my poems, "Milk and Bread," that was first published by editor Cooper Renner in elimae and that can be read in my They Talk About Death chapbook. I am certainly not the only poet who was inspired by Sylvia's death. Thomas Rain Crowe wrote a beautiful poem--"Poem for Sylvia Plath Without Even Lighting the Stove"-- on the subject that you may read here and so did Tania Pryputniewicz in her "Sylvia III," from her November Butterfly collection.

Amelia Rosselli was one of Italy's best women poets. I have always admired her craft in writing her lines in either Italian, English or French. Her mother was English and her father, Carlo Rosselli, was a famous left-wing Italian political leader who had been forced into exile under Mussolini and who was assassinated in France when Amelia was barely seven. After years of living abroad in France, England and the United States, she finally settled in Rome. Rosselli was a translator too. Plath was a poet very dear to her. No wonder she chose defenestration on Plath's very death anniversary. I often visit her tomb at the Protestant Cemetery. Everyone is usually busy paying a tribute to Keats, Shelley and Corso, but Rosselli should indeed not be overlooked.





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