Praise for Among the Pale Spires : "David Smart shines new light on the brief but brilliant life of Italian climber and poet Antonia Pozzi. As she navigated the grinding cruelty of fascism, she found her moral and spiritual compass among the limestone towers of the Dolomites, where her voice was unleashed. Smart''s portrait of her passionate arguments for resistance against repression is both timely and eloquent." --Bernadette McDonald , author of multiple books, including Alpine Rising and Winter 8000 "As David Smart observes in his introduction to Among the Pale Spires , mountaineering history has been replete with reporters and philosophers, but not notable poets. Here, he has uncovered the life story and poetry of Antonia Pozzi, who was born into wealth and raised amid the rise of fascism in 1930s Italy. She loved passionately and lived as freely as she could, climbing with the great Emilio Comici and finding her poetic voice in the mountains. Pozzi would die young, and her poetry would be censored and even burned before it found an audience. Hers is a story of relevant history, poignant biography, and transcendent poetry.

Smart notes she lived in a world "where the soul conversed with mountains." He inhabits this same ethereal domain and, fortunately for readers, takes us there." --David Stevenson , author of Letters from Chamonix and Warnings Against Myself "In this graceful biography, David Smart masterfully captures Antonia Pozzi''s struggle to find personal and political freedom through poetry and mountain climbing. Beset by the constraints of patriarchy, her growing horror at the rise of fascism under Mussolini, and her fragile mental health, she found refuge in the mountains, which gave her agency and inspiration. Pozzi''s poems are acts of quiet resistance. Now, as fascism once again rises in the Western world, the story of her life and work is an important one for our times." --Maria Coffey , author of 13 books, including Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow and Instead: Navigating the Adventures of a Childfree Life "David Smart traces the life and poetry of Antonia Pozzi with depth and clarity, and she emerges from his vision as a tour de force, unredacted, thrilling, and politically resonant. Through his own brilliant lyricism, Smart affirms Pozzi''s singular way of writing about the natural world, particularly her profound engagement with mountain landscapes as spaces of resistance.

In doing so, he secures her place in literary history while further establishing himself as a distinguished and authoritative voice in the field of historical mountain writing." --Faye Latham , poet and author of British Mountaineers "Through the stories and poems of Antonia Pozzi, David Smart reminds us that gaps in histories and spaces between lines are not voids, but places where blizzards can swirl through spires and souls, where wildness can reawaken in the pathways of pens across notebooks and feet over snow, and where resistance can flare again in the reflections of light on stone." --Katie Ives , author of Imaginary Peaks: The Riesenstein Hoax and Other Mountain Dreams "With Among the Pale Spires , David Smart continues his remarkable work of bringing deeply important, yet often overlooked, figures from climbing history back into the light. This new account, exploring both the life of poet and climber Antonia Pozzi and the compelling intersection between her art and the mountains, is once again proof of Smart''s deep appreciation and understanding of the alpine world." --Geoff Powter , author of Strange and Dangerous Dreams , Inner Ranges , and Survival Is Not Assured "An evocation of what it means to bring the mountains into oneself, Among the Pale Spires bristles with Antonia Pozzi''s creative sparks and desires, even as she lived through a time of female oppression shaped by patriarchal fascism." --Heather Dawe , author of Dreams of Lost Buttress , Adventures in Mind , High Inspiration , and Think Again.