Xenia by Eugenio Montale Ian Marriott through reflections on memory and

through reflections on memory and artifice

‘A perfectly pitched quest for lost innocence’ John Burnside

Fetch (& Other Stories)

I did all I could

          it was never owned by anyone

Xenia by Eugenio Montale Ian Marriott through reflections on memory andIn its literary impact, Montale's Xenia, published in 1966 in an edition of just 50 copies, might be described as Italy's The Waste Land. This now famous sequence came in profound response to the death, in 1963, of his beloved wife whom he nicknamed Mosca, a woman so short sighted as to have reputedly apologised when bumping into a mirror. At the end of the Xenia sequence, Montale allegorises the story of his Florentine ark of precious artefacts