Letters from a Young Father
poems by
Edoardo Ponti
Letters from a Young Father Copyright © 2018 by Edoardo Ponti All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.
Book layout by Olyvia Ashley
Cover illustration by Nick Bantock
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ponti, Edoardo, 1973–author.
Title: Letters from a young father : poems / by Edoardo Ponti.
Description: First edition. | Pasadena, CA: Xeno Books, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018002833 | ISBN 9781939096036 (alk. paper) ISBN 9781939096067 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Father and chld—Poetry. | Parenthood—Poetry. | Life—Poetry.
Classification: LCC PS3616.O618 A6 2018 | DDC 811/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018002833
The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey & Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the Kinder Morgan Foundation, the Allergan Foundation, the Riordan Foundation, and the Amazon Literary Partnership partially support Red Hen Press.
First Edition
Published by XENO Books
An imprint of Red Hen Press
To Papà,
I tried so hard to turn you into the parent I yearned for I never took the time to appreciate the father you were.
CONTENTS
Introduction (Written by David St. John)
Before the Beginning
Week 3 (At home, watching the leaves)
Week 4 (Holding a jasmine blossom)
Week 5 (After rain)
Week 6 (Up ’til 5)
Week 7 (Second office to the left)
Week 8 (In medias res)
Week 9 (Minutes before Monday)
Week 10 (Stuck in traffic)
Week 11 (In bed, hearing the shower in the bathroom)
Week 12 (In the elevator before my 11 o’clock)
Week 13 (In the front seat, waiting for your mother)
Week 14 (At a train stop)
Week 15 (On the leaking porch)
Week 16 (Beside your mother asleep on the sofa)
Week 17 (After a phone call with mammina)
Week 18 (A thought watching TV)
Week 19 (Can’t sleep)
Week 20 (After blowing out my birthday candles)
Week 21 (While swimming, this memory)
Week 22 (On a napkin with a broken pencil)
Week 23 (A hard day & now this)
Week 24 (In the rearview mirror)
Week 25 (Light while I write)
Week 26 (That song made me do it)
Week 27 (And this other song made me do this)
Week 28 (In Zürich in transfer)
Week 29 (With the ultrasound in my wallet)
Week 30 (Hearing laughter across the street)
Week 31 (Two days after April Fools’)
Week 32 (In Geneva, in a cab)
Week 33 (Day for night with a moon so full)
Week 34 (Back on the TGV)
Week 35 (Written in one breath)
Week 36 (Right before walking in)
Week 37 (Watching your mother apply lipstick)
Week 38 (Watching a gardener blow leaves off my deck)
Week 39 (Watching her smile)
Week 40 (In the waiting room with both grandmothers)
After All
What a remarkable book this is. In Letters from a Young Father, poet and filmmaker Edoardo Ponti has given us a haunting, deeply moving and celebratory collection of poems that is truly unlike anything I know—a book of poems addressed to his unborn child that echoes both Yeats’s famous poem “A Prayer for My Daughter” as well as Rainer Maria Rilke’s exquisite and timeless volume, Letters to a Young Poet.
Edoardo Ponti’s Letters from a Young Father is a journal in poetry, each of these elegant and meditative poems having been cast in the form of a letter addressed to the poet’s child—a poem for each week of his child’s coming to term, the forty weeks leading to birth. A powerful diary of both self-reflection and autobiography, this book becomes most urgently a hymnal of hopes as well as a handbook of intimate instructions for charting a path for the life ahead. Quietly, inevitably, Letters from a Young Father reveals itself to be also a book of prayers, psalms and songs for every new child due for arrival in our world, as each page is intricately stitched with this poet’s delicate revelations of his many learned—and hard-earned—wisdoms.
The arc of time measured by this collection begins far before Edoardo Ponti and his wife know of the child who will be coming to them. The poems of Letters from a Young Father necessarily become poems of memoir as well, a casting back to the poet’s own childhood and early adulthood, enfolding stories and details of his personal history—not only his family history but also the profound and deeply compelling love story of Edoardo Ponti and his wife, the mother of the child he addresses.
Letters from a Young Father is a book of treasured reckonings, recollections and reflections not only about the family the poet has grown up within but also—perhaps most importantly—about the family he is making.
Edoardo