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 Ponti asks: What makes a family? What are or will be the most sustaining elements that he, the poet-as-the-son, might carry with him as he moves toward this unknown role of being a new father, of being the son-as-a-father? Necessarily, he reflects passionately upon the presences of his own father and his own mother, recalling powerfully what they have given to him in the life leading to this moment.
Just as crucially, the poems of Letters from a Young Father emerge as spare epistles in which Edoardo Ponti searches for any lasting understanding that he might pass along to his child as he considers the dimensions and dilemmas of our existence in a complex world. He offers his own experience interwoven with loving and modest notes of instruction about those ways one might choose to live ethically and faithfully in this world.
Letters from a Young Father is one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful books of recent years. If I were to choose just one book to give to a new father or to a new mother at the beginning of his or her journey to becoming a parent, it would be, without question, Edoardo Ponti’s Letters from a Young Father.
—David St. John