We close out this week with a recent addition to the PennSound author page of Dennis Barone: a brief set of four poems by Pascal D'Angelo (1894–1932, shown at right) recorded at his home in January of this year.
Barone begins the recording with a capsule biography of D'Angelo, a now-obscure poet who came to the US in his teens, and gave up "pick and shovel" work as a day labor to pursue his desire to become a poet, eventually publishing his autobiography Son of Italy, which included a selection of ten poems, in 1924. Carl Van Doren, an early mentor who penned the introduction to that book, hailed D'Angelo's "enormous struggles against every disadvantage" as representational of the cruel depravations that our nation's immigrant underclass endured in the pre-Depression years. Barone then reads four poems taken from diverse sources — "Accident in the Coal Dump," "Mid-Dream," "To Some Modern Poets," and "The Toilers" — out the twenty-seven or so that remain, providing brief introductions to each.
Click here to start exploring these poems on our Dennis Barone author page.
