Dear Italy Magazine,I have been a

Dear Italy Magazine,

I have been a recipient of your lovely magazine for years but never actually logged in as a 'member'. I have gathered and appreciated so much stuff about where to go, what to do, and above all in teh period 2005-6 ehrn I was restoring a house outside Lucca - well actually I don't think I could have done without you at that stage. I live in Dublin with my wife but ever 6 to 8 weeks either I  or both of us go to the house in Lucca for about a week. Here's the thing: I discovered a beautiful little book of poetry by a tuscan lady who had just passed away a few months before, and I got to know her son, himself a famous author in Italy, Marco Vichi. the lovely thing was that, on inviting hem for dinner on the coast less than a year before she died, she asked him  if he would look at a couple of poems she had written, to see if they were any good. He was nervous - how do you tell your mum that she really isn't a poet? - but he was moved to tears at their beauty and asked her if she had any more. Apparently - unbeknown to him and his brothers - she had been writing them and hiding them all over the house in Florence from the nineteen-fifties on, and never thinking they were any good. Marco took off back to hte house to find as many as she could tell him were thee and sent them to a publisher, not letting them know about the connection, to let the poems, as he put it, 'walk on their own legs.' Before he got home, the publisher rang to say he would love to publish them . when his mother - Paola Cannas - heard this she simply said, 'I only wanted to know if you liked them , do you mean he (the editir) liked them too?'

  As a present for Marco, on my next visit to see him I brought a translation into English of all the poems. When I asked him if they were in english yet, he said that, sadly, that would have to wait for a long time. He was elated when he saw them in English and said that it was a dream of his they would take off in England.

Before Paola died - only two months after her 'little big book'came out (as it was called in Italy!) Paola died, March 17th, 2013. Her dying wish was that any proceeds that might come from it should go to charity, and this Marco found in a group that builds schools for literacy in Bangla Desh and trains the teachers there, called il Filo di Juta (The jute thread.)

On hearing all this, I spent two years looking for a publisher for the English version in the UK, Ireland and the US. I decided that my translation royalties too would go to Filo di Juta if it got published.

And it happened! - in March this year,  when a UK publisher, Augur Press, through the vision of their fantastic Editor who recognisesthe  beautyand simplicity and the depth of the poems - Mirabelle Maslin - decided to go with it.

You can see her introduction/notes etc with the book on Amazon.co.uk, and many other sites now just ahead of its publication date on the 6th of July next.

I was thinking what a lovely thing for your readers to see this poetry, as its so rare to get a glimpse of the thoughts of a mother and housewife -  in this case in fifties and sixties Tuscany - in your own language, as so much lovely Italian material is not translated.

Would you mind looking at it and telling your readers too? And it is for such a good cause as well!

The little book of poetry is called: Visions, Breaths and Sighs by Paola Cannas, translated by myself, now a 'member' of your magazine at last!

Congratulations on the best magazine of it kind anywhere!

Yours Sincerely,

Bernard Wade (Dublin and Lucca)