Album of History and Decay

By Paul Gray

EZRA POUND IN ITALY: FROM THE PISAN CANTOS

Edited by Gianfranco Ivancich; Photographs by Vittorugo Contino Rizzoli; 136 pages; $27.50

This book arrives like a packet of snapshots long lost in the mail. In 1968, some four years before his death, Poet Ezra Pound agreed to accompany an Italian photographer on a tour of the locales that had inspired him during the writing of the Pisan Cantos 23 years earlier. The freedom to roam was ironic, for when Pound had composed these poems he had not been free to travel anywhere. He was incarcerated in the U.S. Army Disciplinary Training Center in Pisa, charged with treason for making speeches over Rome radio in support of Mussolini's regime. For the first three weeks of his imprisonment, Pound, then 59, was kept in a small outdoor cage with a cement floor, free only to watch the Pisan clouds by day and "O moon my pin-up" at night. Improbably, some of his greatest poetry flowered there and in the tent where he languished during the next five months.

The pictorial record of Pound's unsentimental journey through old memories and older landmarks makes for intriguing viewing on several levels. First there are the sites themselves. Although a few of his shots smack of artiness, Photographer Vittorugo Contino is usually content to let Pisa, Verona and especially the stones of Venice speak for themselves. His black-and-white photography starkly captures the Venetian redolence of intrigue, history and decay.

Next there are the accompanying excerpts and snippets from the Pisan Can tos, reproduced in Pound's handwriting. Good poetry should stand on its own feet, but Pound's presents a special case. Although as a young man he campaigned tirelessly for the sharpest possible image expressed in the fewest possible words, his later poems grew increasingly allusive, personal and cryptic. Images were still present but encoded. Seeing what Pound saw before it filtered through his mind helps break that code. Sometimes the pictures simply amplify the words. Two pages of dark, roiling skyscape follow lines on Pisan's "undoubtedly various" clouds. More often than not though, a photographic sight helps explain a sound. A line like "Can Grande's grin like Tommy Cochran's" is meaningless without the knowledge that Tommy Cochran was "a kid" Pound knew as a youth, and without an image of the statue Can Grande della Scala in Verona. The statue and the grin are here.

Finally there are the rare, unsettling views of Pound himself. Unlike Yeats, Joyce and Eliot, the great modernists whom he coached and championed, Pound never prepared a public face. Even at 83, he remained unsmiling and ill at ease in front of the camera, although he had come to look like the personification of an aging bard. His unruly hair had whitened into a mane, and his face bore lines and wrinkles beyond the mere ravages of time. In "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (1920) Pound had praised "the obscure reveries of the inward gaze." As these pictures prove, it became his characteristic expression.

Except occasionally, when his brooding dark eyes flared. Several photographs capture these moments, showing Ezra Pound's face as a palimpsest of his tangled character, the battleground over which genius and crankiness had struggled for so long. At such tunes he no longer looks like a frail and elderly man. He is Lear, a tragic, flawed figure who created a literary kingdom and then drove himself into exile. Paul Gray

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