Cavalcanty

Peter Hughes has taken Guido Cavalcanti’s groundbreaking poems and used them as springboards for his own creative versions. Cavalcanti was a 13th-century Tuscan poet who brought an extraordinary intensity and craft to his explorations of the social and psychological dimensions of love. He employed the Tuscan vernacular and helped create a new poetry which belonged to the city rather than the court. He has had a significant influence on English poetry through the translations of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (first published in 1861) and then through the work of Ezra Pound.

Peter Hughes was born in Oxford in 1956. He lived in Italy for several years and continues to find inspiration in Italian literature. He now lives on the Norfolk coast where he runs Oystercatcher Press, an imprint which has published over 100 pamphlets of exciting poetry. A Selected Poems came out from Shearsman in 2013. Peter’s versions of the complete sonnets of Petrarch were published by Reality Street in 2015.