Letters from a Young Father

by Edoardo Ponti

Overview

Becoming a parent changes everything. Fear and love live together. Suddenly there is a person in the world for whom you want happiness and safety, even when those two don't always coincide. Diary of a Young Father comprises forty letter-poems written by award-winning film director Edoardo Ponti to his unborn child during the forty weeks of his wife’s pregnancy. These poems are gifts, lessons, slices of joy, maps for how we build a life, for how we work and learn, how we love, and how we remember.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781939096036
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	05/15/2018
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Edoardo Ponti is a film director who divides his time between California and Italy. A legacy of film greats—son of Sophia Loren and producer Carlo Ponti, Sr.—Edoardo has made a name for himself in the industry with numerous award-winning shorts, feature films, as well as plays and an opera. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Southern California with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Creative Writing. He is married to the actress Sasha Alexander, with whom he has two wonderful children. This is his first book of poetry.

Table of Contents

Introduction (Written by David St John) 11

Before the Beginning 13

Week 3 (At home, watching the leaves) 15

Week 4 (Holding a jasmine blossom) 17

Week 5 (After rain) 18

Week 6 (Up 'til 5) 20

Week 7 (Second office to the left) 22

Week 8 (In medias res) 24

Week 9 (Minutes before Monday) 26

Week 10 (Stuck in traffic) 27

Week 11 (In bed, hearing the shower in the bathroom) 28

Week 12 (In the elevator before my 11 o'clock) 29

Week 13 (In the front seat, waiting for your mother) 30

Week 14 (At a train stop) 32

Week 15 (On the leaking porch) 33

Week 16 (Beside your mother asleep on the sofa) 34

Week 17 (After a phone call with mammina) 35

Week 18 (A thought watching TV) 37

Week 19 (Can't sleep) 39

Week 20 (After blowing out my birthday candles) 40

Week 21 (While swimming, this memory) 41

Week 22 (On a napkin with a broken pencil) 43

Week 23 (A hard day & now this) 44

Week 24 (In the rearview mirror) 46

Week 25 (Light while I write) 47

Week 26 (That song made me do it) 48

Week 27 (And this other song made me do this) 49

Week 28 (In Zürich in transfer) 50

Week 29 (With the ultrasound in my wallet) 51

Week 30 (Hearing laughter across the street) 52

Week 31 (Two days after April Fools') 53

Week 32 (In Geneva, in a cab) 55

Week 33 (Day for night with a moon so full) 57

Week 34 (Back on the TGV) 58

Week 35 (Written in one breath) 60

Week 36 (Right before walking in) 61

Week 37 (Watching your mother apply lipstick) 62

Week 38 (Watching a gardener blow leaves off my deck) 64

Week 39 (Watching her smile) 66

Week 40 (In the waiting room with both grandmothers) 67

After All 68

Editorial Reviews

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’ famous poem “A Prayer for My Daughter” as well as Rainer Maria Rilke’s exquisite and timeless volume, Letters to a Young Poet. . . . 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.

from book introduction - David St. John