Amelia Rosselli was born in Paris in 1930 and died in Rome in 1996, leaping from the kitchen window of her apartment. She has long been recognised as one of the most formidable post-war Italian poets. In an early critical appreciation, Fausto Curi described her work as ‘ravenous, violent and dreamlike’. Pasolini admiringly compared her language to ‘the most terrible laboratory experiments, tumours, atomic blasts’. In a review from the 1970s, Andrea Zanzotto – also grasping for an image to describe her linguistic intensity – pictured her words as ‘clawed little monsters of light’.

Rosselli’s work is exciting and alien, a little frightening. For readers in English, her reputation has been secured by a number of excellent translations over the past twenty years. The most important of these are Lucia Re and Paul Vangelisti’s War Variations (2003/2016), which presents her first published book, Variazioni Bellichi (1964), and Jennifer Scappettone’s Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli (2012), an editorial triumph, bringing together extracts from interviews and correspondence, a selection of photographs and a comprehensive introductory essay. Thanks to these books, Rosselli found a ready audience among the leftist experimental poets of the 2010s, commanding respect and a certain awe. She was not the kind of poet whose work we knew by heart, but she was a poet we agreed on, a litmus test of difficulty and a watchword of invention.

The recently reissued Sleep is perhaps her most unusual book. Written in English, it consists of 126 short poems, mostly untitled. It was composed in what Barry Schwabsky calls, in his useful introduction, ‘three campaigns’, spanning 1953-55, 1960-61 and 1965-66. This means that it both is and isn’t early work, and it shadows and overlaps Rosselli’s first two books in Italian. It isn’t clear if the material was produced in an initial burst and subsequently revised, edited and shaped, or if Rosselli’s process was one of intermittent accumulation of fresh work. Each poem feels unfinished but perfect, or like a damaged fresco we can’t quite imagine was ever complete in the first place.

Though extracts from Sleep appeared in Locomotrix – and the sequence has been available with facing-page Italian translations since 1992 – Rosselli’s English poetry has not been widely known to anglophone readers. Rosselli spent a good deal of her childhood and adolescence in Britain and the United States. In 1937, her father – the antifascist activist Carlo Rosselli, who had recently returned to France after fighting in the Spanish Civil War – was murdered on Mussolini’s orders, along with her uncle Nello. When France fell to the Nazis, Rosselli and her brothers fled with their mother – the English suffragist Marion Cave Rosselli – first to London, then to New York and then back to London in 1946. Weakened by the hardship of years spent in exile, Marion died in 1949. Rosselli, still a teenager, moved to Rome, where she found work as a translator.

The poems in Sleep are, unsurprisingly, marked by these experiences. The beginning of the sequence simultaneously registers Carlo and Nello’s violent deaths and Rosselli’s own sense of displacement:

What woke those tender heavy fat hands

said the executioner as the hatchet fell

down upon their bodily stripped souls

fermenting in the dust. You are a stranger here

and have no place among us.

Rosselli’s accusatory register is much too volatile, too mobile, for speechifying or rousing oratory. She draws on parable and lullaby, writing from a position of vulnerability and exposure. A sense of mortal danger is fundamental to the work. There are police summons and brawls, the threat of a massacre at court and at least a dozen references to hell. ‘Tenderness itself is dangerous’, she writes at one point. But the poems are rarely harsh: they emerge from deep gloom, wisps of fog, before suddenly, catlike, darting away.

Amelia’s older brother John once wrote that Carlo and Nello came to be treated ‘as saints, or more prosaically as street names’ in post-war Italy. Sleep could be read as an ambivalent, at times even withering, analysis of martyrdom. Despite Rosselli’s secular Jewish background and Marion’s Quakerism, much of this is explicitly Christological:

Then you got reality: at the age of thirty-three

dying on the cross, at cross-country, murdering

your parents’ parents, saving that which was true

to your cumbersome nature. Then you got a sort

of freedom, by playing truant to all good causes,

then you fetched the seamstress, and she put things

straight.

Elsewhere there are crowns of thorns and time on the rack, and if I squint at a passage where someone tied to a chair shoots out arrows, I’m sure I can see a mirror-image Saint Sebastian.

In the 1950s Rosselli’s own politics began to depart from the ‘good cause’ of her parents, who were avowedly non-Marxist (and more importantly, non-Leninist) liberal socialists. In a letter to John in 1952 – a year before commencing Sleep – Rosselli discussed her growing frustrations with ‘democratic, gradual revolution’, given the fate of the post-war Labour government and the ‘floundering’ Italian socialists. In 1958 she would join the Communist Party (PCI).

Readers looking for didactic anthology pieces will be disappointed. Rosselli’s poems are assuredly not fit for placards; phrases can’t easily be plucked from their surrounding context, where it isn’t always clear who is speaking. She is guarded, suspicious and seems to have little interest in telling anyone what to do or how to feel. Nonetheless, some of the most moving moments in Sleep come in half-strangled declarations of political commitment, with glancing references to her ‘red roots’ and ‘revolutionary heart’. Emerging from historical and personal catastrophe ‘impertinent with grief’, Rosselli did not turn away from the practical tasks of socialist and communist organizing. But nor did she renounce her restlessness and uncertainty, the sometimes impractical feelings provoked by loss.

Rosselli’s decision to write in English – the language of her mother, but not her mother tongue – carries a certain pathos. Doing so while living in Italy implies a degree of withdrawal from public language, as if Rosselli writes towards an inward domain of familial intimacy. But if the configuration of that domain has been disturbed by the death of her parents, then writing in English is also a signal of estrangement, a turning inside-out, searching the language for what’s gone missing. These are porous and sometimes brittle poems, where the barriers between public and private, self and other, memory and expectation seem corroded. Because Rosselli did not, after all, become an English poet – her career really begins as an affiliate of the neoavangardia ‘Gruppo 63’ – it’s tempting to see Sleep as an act of exorcism or a settling of accounts. For her part, in an interview in the 1990s, Rosselli described English as ‘a very neutral language, barely emotional even in the vowels’.

The poems in Sleep are rarely funny exactly, but there’s a kind of gleeful pastiche as she tries on the metaphysical poets for size, adopts Shakespearian poses, demonstrates her flair and audacity. English was also the language of her schooling, and at one point she reduces Donne to a kind of haiku: ‘Ye who do Batter me with Wordes / be Still: my Soul does rise in Silence / up the Sordid Moon’. But nobody could mistake these poems for simple exercises. Another vignette, hushed and beautiful, runs:

o the trees are wild with winter tension

and the leaves rush upon the big mat

gallop-horsed

(and the leaves tumble like wild birds on the heath)

Here the act of shaking out a doormat is briefly imagined as the cracking of reins, spurring us on towards winter. The dead leaves have some life in them yet, held in fragile parenthesis. It reminds me of modernist imitations of classical Chinese poetry: Ezra Pound’s ‘L’iu Che’, where ‘a wet leaf clings to a threshold’, full of clarity and sadness.

Rosselli’s form in Sleep, while taut, is generally unobtrusive. Ten or so poems are only two lines long. A couple are even shorter. Her line breaks are often surprising, like a jutting-out paving slab or the jolt of a missed step. Her rhymes can be sardonic and cajoling, as in the final stanza of the final poem in the main body of the text (before the appendix of poems omitted by Rosselli from the Italian edition):

The stop: the glare the blare the hare

the hinges and the ruts all were there

singing or crying or fornicating or swinging

to a merry tune: your nostalgia, your

unhampered care: my business and your

solace.

Rosselli trained as a musicologist and attended the Darmstadt summer courses for New Music. In the letter to her brother where she declares her nascent communism, she discusses her attempts to develop a new notation system for transcribing the folk music of Lucania, in Southern Italy. She was not interested in merry tunes or nostalgia. The poems seem to demand to be sung, the words elongated and the pitches drawn out.

In an obituary for her friend Maximilian Voloshin, Marina Tsvetaeva once wrote of ‘putting out your ear like a shield’. It’s an appealing image, because it might be a defensive manoeuvre, like the brace we adopt for bad news, or a strategic parry, the way we listen while we plan our next move. Rosselli writes like a poet under constant threat of attack:

be kind be kind be kind I hear this phrase

screaming in my ear each day, be sweet

be sweet be sweet be sweet this is all

I can say (or seem to say).

Elsewhere she describes ‘singing rot / into the crashed ears’, which uncannily suggests ‘crashed cars’ without quite adding up to a pun. Rosselli’s poetry is a form of counter-music, a score for liberation, where struggle might involve something other than sweetness and kindness. The bitterness of this knowledge – ‘that shaft of marmalade lightning / that hiss in the prayer’ ­– demands that poetry resist and warp the language of business-as-usual.

In the final third of Sleep, Rosselli begins to square up to her theme, ‘staring in the face that / grey hound: death’. It’s as if we’ve had to earn each poem’s trust, and in return they can grow longer, more complicated and confrontational. What follows is a climactic series of violent, questioning lyrics, whose address seems both rhetorical – for the attention of the reader – and punishingly self-directed. The movement begins: ‘Who am I talking to? Who asks me / anything? What rebel use have you / for my jargon?’ and ends some twenty pages later with the mock-Jacobean ‘Would you have me fry in my soup? Or / be the everlasting damsel in her skirts?’ It is delirious and unnerving, almost operatic.

In one of the most intriguing and affecting moments she writes: ‘And are you crazy really? and are you your / friend’s friend?’. The lines brought to mind Muriel Rukeyser’s late 1930s elegy ‘Rotten Lake’: ‘are you your best friend’s / best friend?’ These are insecurities that anyone might identify with, but which take particular shape in periods of political defeat and disaster. It’s not impossible that Rosselli read Rukeyser; later she would translate Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath. Certainly they belong with one another as urgent poets of the mid-century left.

It seems to me that the difficult power of Sleep makes it hard to share: you want to be left alone with it, rather than to push it eagerly into the hands of friends, whether best ones or otherwise. If Shakespeare had his problem plays, these are problem poems, sitting uneasily in Rosselli’s own oeuvre and hard to assimilate to our nationally constrained notions of what constitutes English poetry. Maybe Sleep could provide a different starting point for thinking about the fate of late modernism in post-war Britain. We could construct a lineage of exiles, of migrant languages, a seam of experiment and survival.

The book is pocket-size; you can take it with you on the move and ‘hold it into the round world’s / marvellous substance’. Yet the ghostliness of Sleep can’t quite be shaken off, even with repeated readings. These are Rosselli’s first poems, and it’s not impossible to imagine a different ending, where she returned to English in her old age, completing the circuit. But such apparent consolation would be the work of some other poet, the result of another kind of life. What we’re left with is singular: a ferocious, perfect interim.

Read on: Rossana Rossanda, ‘The Comrade from Milan’, NLR 49.