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Note on I Fed  At my first whiff of Bartolo Cattafi’s poems, when Brian Cole was translating them (Anthracite, Arc Publications), I knew nothing of Cattafi’s gradual shedding of appearance and his arrival at the minimalist geometries of some ground of being or ‘ultimate reality’.  I liked his minimalism before I understood it, and his pessimism too, both of which I’ve stolen and applied here to memory and loss.  For a fuller discussion of this poem, of obliquity and minimalism, see the Essays.

Alan Marshfield

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