"Reading Immediate Worlds is like entering a universe of both/and rather than either/or. Many poems in this volume show us how to see connections among entities often seen as disparate. Bernini highlights the links between our planet and others, between art and life, between the public and the private. …This volume documents Bernini's technical ease in marrying method and meaning, making readers conscious of linkages to which we might otherwise be blind. …Bernini transports us to a realm where apparent opposites are miraculously reconciled."
—Selma R. Burkom, Professor Emerita, San Francisco State University
Anthony Bernini was born in New York City and now lives and works in Brunswick, New York. His poems have appeared in a number of anthologies and journals published in the Northeast, and he reads his work in New York's Hudson Valley and in New England. Bernini's narrative poem, "The Escape of Cloelia," is currently featured at the Italian Americana website. Bernini is the author of Distant Kinships, a volume of poetry that was published in 2002. While pursuing his craft as a poet, Bernini has had a checkered career as an inadvertent despoiler of the planet Earth, where he is currently making a limited appearance.
“We have heard so much confessional, ego-centered poetry over the past decades; it is thoroughly refreshing to find the objective world so clearly in focus: stars and trees, local streets and dogs barking, lovers and weddings and graveyards, the rhythms of nature. Anthony Bernini speaks with an original voice on the eternal subjects of the lyrical imagination. In the end, he does confess, but only through his subtle interpretation of things. To read his taut, thoroughly composed, epigrammatic poetry is to see the world again in its variousness and primordial mystery, as in ‘A Palm Doll’, ‘At an Unscheduled Appearance of the Moon’, ‘Not Alone’, ‘The Sirens’, ‘Faith in the Groves’, or dozens of other poems in this extraordinarily rich collection.”
—John Paul Russo, Book Review Editor, Italian Americana; author of The Future without a Past: The Humanities in a Technological Society, winner of the 2006 Thomas N. Bonner Prize
