Eugenio Cirese has earned his place in the extremely varied landscape of Italian dialect literature as a notable poet. Critics and writers such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Barberi Squarotti, Carlo Betocchi, and others consider him to have been the first important writer to use the dialect of Molise as a literary language with a keen awareness of the implications--personal, literary, social, ideological--inherent in such a choice. He instinctively recognized the dignity and latent power of this unwieldy, untested instrument, both mother tongue and sacred language, and he took it from the musical tradition of the popular song to the airy lightness and purity of his last poems. He was always convinced of the necessity to write in dialect. In 1953 Cirese wrote to Pasolini: "Il dialetto è una lingua. Perché possa essere mezzo di espressione poetica e trasformarsi in linguaggio e immagini è necessario possederla tutta; avere coscienza...