If I read again the poems collected in this volume, I see the images – usually confused – about my life and, for a moment, the picture of my spring filled with summer scents, appears in its entirety. If I were dead, and climbing the sky, about to turn back in order to discover the image created by my steps, I believe that I would see the shape of a wolf, one that isn’t usually dangerous, restlessly wondering in the night, never going far from its home in case it needs to rush to its family’s aid.
I think, in fact, that there really exists something that is worth struggling for, worth living for and, if necessary, worth dying for. Poetry has been for me the nursery rhyme to repeat in order to remember my way, an invisible steel thread made of notes and passion, of games and tortures; a thread that could not break and that could not betray.
In these last months, that have brought me back in this “Sceptred Isle”, I discovered lots of new colours to my soul, or so let’s call it. To begin with, I have understood that it is possible to die because of solitude, but that it is possible to live through it, to live through shutting the eyes and seeing the universe that nourishes itself. So, after spending two months of absolute grey in Oxford, I discovered, escaping for the second time in my life to Reading, that, in this land, there are lawns of perpetual green – where it is possible to hide from the fears of the day; it only needs careful attention to those sudden gusts of wind that can be dangerous to those who, like me, have got a heart that has beaten in unison with the waves on the coast of Acciaroli during childhood.
When I think of poetry, I like to think of it as follows: as the echo of a splash of the sea upon the shadows of those thousand-year-old rocks, that remember – after the continuous modeling of the wind and water – the shadows of the bodies of human beings. A splash capable of emitting a redeeming scent that, once smelt, we cannot live without.
In these first years in which I bound myself to poetry, I was often required to describe it: I discussed it as a message perfectly made by a child who notices his broken toy and, stunned by this tragic event, finds a new method of expression which allows him to cry out his pain, in order that someone springs to his aid. Consequently, he needs to build this new message in the way best suited to be understood. Other times, I have discussed poetry as something that comes in useful for nothing and nobody because it is only capable of beating down, so to speak, doors that are already open, bodies that are already on their last legs, those, in other words, for whom poetry is not a necessity and, on the other hand, it is not capable of reaching the “resolved” and arid hearts of those that could benefit from it the most.
On reflecting upon the word “Poetry”, as well as upon the word “Love”, or upon any other word, I have thought that, after all, they are only signifiers of bodies that don’t know that they are dead, and I will let you imagine the countless reasons for this affirmation. Poetry is also for me something that cannot be summed up because it is itself a summary; it derives from the essential, from the draining. Moreover poetry is something that is useful to define us and the universe because it is quintessence. I believe, then, that poetry needs ambiguity: the higher the ambiguity, the higher the temperature of the text. Poetry is also that text which can give one or more solutions to a determinate problem; and, if it is possible, it may also improve the spirit’s sorrows and pains. Poetry is many things, among them my mother, my father, my sisters, our madness…
An artist is he who is able to release, from his own supreme instrument (the human body) the notes that are capable of twanging the instruments nearby: those that are similar and those that appear dead and unable to play.
And if even just one of these inefficient instruments will twang slightly under the artistic influence, then the artwork will have had a purpose; indeed, it will have one even if it twangs the instruments that are already predisposed to do so.
If in this volume there is real poetry (a term that contains a critical judgment of absolute beauty) I cannot say. What I can affirm is that you will be able to find my real essence here and that – in accordance with the wishes of every man – I hope it will remain as a reminiscence of me after the sun has devoured my flesh.
I hope that God, if He exists, takes pity on me and forgives me, even if I am still unable to forgive Him.
Reading, UK, 2010
