THE DANCE AT St. GABRIEL’S
Poems by Felix Stefanile

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Felix Stefanile is the founding editor of the poetry journal Sparrow. A veteran of World War II and a professor at Purdue University for twenty-six years, he lives in Indiana where he is a leading advocate of New Formalism.

”To say that Felix Stefanile is the most significant living Italian-American poet does not do full justice to his achievement. Yes, his luminous intelligence, unillusioned emotion, and delicious humour capture the immigrant experience with unmatched immediacy, but, nourished on Dante, Cavalcanti, Petrarch, and Saba, Stefanile instinctively finds the universal in the memorably specific. When he writes so movingly of living between two languages and two cultures, he not only presents the immigrant’s situation but the human dilemma.” – Dana Gioia

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Grandfather’s Story

My mother bathed me in warm wine
for I was weak and puny at my birth.
The wine kept me alive, and I grew stronger.
My father warmed the wine
with a horseshoe burned red hot.
Thus I took in the cleverness of wine,
the endurance of iron.
To cool me then my mother cradled me
in the new leaves
of a blooming chestnut tree.
Soft, soft was the touch,
and I slept mightily.

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THE DANCE AT St. GABRIEL’S
Price £7.95 per copy post free (£5.30 post free to Associate Members)
Cover design: by Chiquita Babb
Publication: 1995 (80 pages laminated paperback)