Signora Bella's Grand Tour
“Lesley Synge’s exquisite poems capture the musicality and rhythms of Italian life. With humour, gentle irony and a poet’s insight, Signora Bella’s Grand Tour is as lovely as the small alphabetised stones our poet collects on Italy’s ancient shores.”
“I’m looking out onto the sparkling ocean and reading your evocative poems. Such longing and joy and melancholy in your words! Brings back distant but poignant memories of my own experiences in the land of passion. Thank you so much. Filled with thoughts of Italy, I shall sit with a coffee and muse some more. ”
Second edition 2023
“This is my third poetry collection, first released in 2019, the second edition in 2023. While in Sicily (on the same holiday that resulted in the fiction work When Giuseppe Met Jackie), I collected unique stones on the northern shore of the beach town of Capo d’Orlando by day and wrote by night. I was supposed to be travelling light but nevertheless packed my haul into my backpack and lugged it north. In Genoa I realised my folly and gave them all away - except for the letters of the alphabet: ‘a writer needs only her alphabet.’ In the Alps I stayed a while in Taleggio Valley and borrowed the power of Mount Zucco to condense my adventures to the bare essentials: haiku in the spirit of the Japanese monk-poet Basho; a draft of a novella in poetry. On return to Australia - like DH Lawrence, Walt Whitman and Virginia Woolf before me - I published this slender volume of verse myself. I’d snapped away while in Bella Italia so matched selected images and haiku and presented a son et lumiere live reading to the Dante Alighieri Society of Brisbane. Many people in the audience were itching to share their own memories of Italy so it became a delicious communal experience. While it’s possible to read the work as the frivolous adventure of an Australian woman who doesn’t give a damn about convention, the perceptive reader understands that the central protagonist is grappling with deep undercurrents of pain. Her ‘Grand Tour’ is actually the means for her to rehearse courage. In the end, these poems celebrate resilience and survival.” - Lesley Synge
Buy Signora Bella’s Grand Tour at State Library of Queensland Bookshop
https://www.shop.slq.qld.gov.au/
For signed copies, contact the author.
the sea would type a book for me
if only i could find
an alphabet of stones
what is Italy if not devout?
even the cats turn out
for the procession of the saint
i doze off in an alpine meadow
on this sweet summer day
the poet and her brother bees at work
