A product of no literary school and without advanced academic training in literature, Carlo Betocchi constructed poetry founded on his reading of poets, his Christian faith, and his direct contact with the world of labor. His principal themes--God, nature, mother, family, his beloved Tuscany, and its inhabitants--may seem at first sight old fashioned and trite; Betocchi avoided banality, however, by filtering his perceptions through what critic Oreste Macrì has called a "grazia sensibile" (sensitive grace). Moreover these themes are reflected in Betocchi's poetic meditations and are the source of a continuing, albeit subdued, drama that unfolded and became more richly complex as his career grew. The result is a body of work that, though it has roots in the nineteenth century, is unmistakably modern.

With Clemente Rèbora, Betocchi was one of the most highly regarded Christian poets in twentieth-century Italy. Yet his Catholicism is never...