Chinese Apples: New and Selected Poems

The eighth volume and first selected poems publication from this San Francisco based poet and art critic shows a scrupulous, if grim, observer and listener, one whose weighty clarities have grown more moving and more profound with time.  No poet is more visceral; these poems carry the sparkling tension and urgency of an artist who does not write or live intellectually, but locally.  Di Piero's sensibility seems to spring from the mood on the streets of San Francisco or float down from the flung-open shutters in his ancestors' Italian villages; the economy of his language has its source in his native South Philly, where "When I was young, they taught us not to ask. / Accept what's there. . . Brick homes, Your Show of Shows, / the mothball fleet and flaring oilworks."