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

intellect that organizes it in orderly and

meaningful sequences.

In Maffia’s poetry one finds none of the

clichés typical of Calabrian dialect poetry.

The poet lives the problems of contemporary

intellectual life, confirming them on the

personal plane, but without giving in to

elegy. If language is the instrument, the

book is the channel through which he can

attest his presence in the world: being made

of words and paper means the possibility of

materializing the self in a medium capable

of fixing even the moment indelibly, so that

one can find it again in time and reexamine

the formal premises in the light of new

certainties and acquisitions absorbed

through the book itself. This does not mean

that the discourse becomes overly

intellectualized in metaphorizing the

experience of solitude always on the verge of