Aficionado of the void

Poet´s Choice: Edward Hirsch features poems by Eugenio Montale. (From The Washington Post. 28.7.02):

The Italian poet Eugenio Montale (1896-1981) was an aficionado of the void, of thresholds and enclosures, of stony enclaves and seacoasts. „I always begin with the real,“ he once said, and he wrote often of his first landscape — a walled-in garden near the Tuscan coast, the sea churning on the other side of the cliffs, the unforgiving sun in an endless blue sky. This is the world stripped to the bone, the „rocky and austere“ Ligurian shore, where he spent summers until he was 30.