Nicely Combed

Matthew Reynolds

• Selected Poems by Giuseppe Ungaretti, translated by Andrew Frisardi
  Carcanet, 287 pp, £14.95, April 2003, ISBN 1 85754 672 5

In Italy you can buy poetry T-shirts featuring lines by Dante, Leopardi and others. The Ungaretti shirt is good value: it gives you a whole work, though not a very long one. ‘Mattina’ (‘Morning’) reads in its entirety as follows:

M’illumino
d’immenso

In books, those words are tethered to a particular location, Santa Maria la Longa, 26 January 1917; but there is a rightness about their transplantation to innumerable present-day torsos. The genius of the poem is in the way it laminates the unique and the general; the way it recognises that while being illuminated with immensity may feel like a miracle to a soldier who has lived through a night – or night after night – in the trenches, it is to most people at most times just the start of another day.