Dialect Poetry of Southern Italy (Italian Poetry in Translation Book 2)

constant attention on the part of the poet

toward all that combines and uncombines in

the flow of time: therefore Marè’s gaze

becomes unfocused, everything gets

deformed for him inside and out, everything

takes on the appearance of what in

figurative art has been called the poetics of

ugliness. In this ugliness, in this fluctuating

monstrosity of things that has the weight of

butterflies and the sticky consistency of rust,

there slips in the glimmer of a fire that

invokes salvation with a “desperate

optimism,” at least the salvation in the unity

of all things. “We are”, wrote Giorgio Patrizi,

“before a text that bears witness to the

existence in contemporary poetry, outside of

fashions and advertising hubbub, of a serious

and rigorous experimentation, capable of

coming to terms with contemporary reality

and with tradition, with the mind’s as well