THE WORD BLUE DEFINES WONDER
"If and when / only the stars know".
Titiwai. The Maori term that titles the poetry collection is a name for nature and wonder, a metaphor for living and the living, enchanting poetry.
Like those larvae that from the caves of the Waitomo district "emit glimmers on the scales of blue", transfiguring the naked stone into an astral vault, a black arch studded with luminous embedded gems, Sandro Angelucci's poems are blue light emerging from silence - "hunted voice / of a silence / that reveals itself while it hides" -, a stellar flash that overcomes darkness and the word to sink into joy and become the world, colouring rainbows en route. And it is in the subdued and grandiose refraction of light that sound, sense defines the place, reorders the true, the space of small stillness, is charged with wonder, illuminates hope, transmits superabundance. From a larva-thing, the infinitesimal minimum in the boundless - "the little (so much) that we have" -, sense assembles identity, awareness the flash, amplitude the sparkle: man, the poet, far from noise and commerce, reaches himself in the excavation of his own heart, communicates from there the natural language, sense the universal good.
"He asks you to eclipse yourself, to get out of the way, not to be intrusive with your ego, which is ashamed to be itself, and plays the fool, and never misses an opportunity to deem true, which on the contrary is false. He asks you for freedom, the space of silence, where everything speaks, everything is heard, and you do not live in vain.
Titiwai. Literally, in the Polynesian language, "projected onto the water".
The calcareous cavities inhabited by firefly-creatures bring back to me, an islander - "From one sea to other seas, / from ports to other ports" - the vivid memory of the blue caves of my Sicilian sea, caverns filed by the waves that in the summers of life are magically illuminated with fresh and clear light, luminosity of cradled shadows, iridescent sunken star, otherworldly sparkle in the turquoise and spicy lapping of musical water - "As the pupils / dilating and contracting / adapt to the changing light / so does my heart...". In a word: Poetry.
The sea. Symbol and end of our transversal writing - "waiting for a child's net to catch us / to put us in a bucket / and then empty it / into all the universes" -, symbol and end of our common wandering.
"I will reach the sea / and then I will understand / that to live one must die, / drown / forgetting to know how to swim".
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Thomas Stearns Eliot
Sandro Angelucci's poetic word is clear, flat and subdued; it is a marine force that carries within itself the calmness of authentic beauty, the ardour of sincere desire. It is simple and incisive - "Poetry does not overflow, it occupies / just enough space" -, a gentle voice that rips through the silence and is structured by silence, in a vision that exalts peaceful and natural living - "leave me a fir tree / that speaks with birdsong" - and goes beyond "the mad race to evade noise", the noise and uselessness of "our mindless chatter".
Apparently unambiguous and clear, that voice is nevertheless polysemic, full of signs and meanings; it is Pan flûte, a simple reed that, bewitching and sincere, hides within itself different, simultaneous and never contradictory keys to interpretation. At the same time, it is an invitation to journey into the depths of ourselves - "And it is here, within us, / the courage of our fears. / Only on the way back do we discover the reason for our journey" -, abandonment to nature and its filial recognition - "Of every bud that opens / give me the silences" -, personal and civil faith in poetic saying and doing - "I want to speak to you / of a place where time / has no place" -, incessant search for the Divine and the sublime - "Every ten metres / a God or what remains / trembles under the stars / under the vault of his promise" -, the breath and vibration of a blade of grass.
The message contained in Titiwai is a warning of awareness and truth, an exhortation to abandon a conception and practice of life aimed at the pursuit of material goods and pleasures and the cult of the transient, the prevailing nihilism aimed at the destruction of any system of values; It is an invitation to discover the beauty and eternity enclosed and protected even in/from the most humble and naive works of creation, the magnificence inherent in Nature to which we all belong, men like peach trees, apple trees and birds, finitude turned into immensity, the relationship between Earth and Heaven, human and Divine.
It is only in the depths of his own being that modern man, the man who is often distorted by too much commerce with people, who runs through the cities of the world in a useless and frenetic bustle, while he deserts the world, the man (perennial Ulysses) who is fleeing even from himself, can find his true essence and identity (Ithaca), the vital charge to face the ever new and unpredictable journey of life.
And if you find it poor, Ithaca will not have let you down.
Now that you are a wise man, with all your experience.
you will already have understood what Ithaca means.
Constantino Kavafis
"An island awaits us / that, without knowing it, we already know / where we were born".
Only in the protection of the real that surrounds us, in respect for Nature, an old mother in need of attention and tender caresses, can humanity find an answer to the fundamental questions of being and existing, discover substance and savour wonder, live in harmony with the true self and the multiform variety of creation, experience noble and lofty goals and finally reach the wisdom of the soul, the original and perpetually renewed Big Bang, finally approach the eternal, the divine - "It is so good to be mortal, / to know that you are part of the mystery" - the heavenly, the imperishable universal and therefore Poetry.
The aim of man (and of poetry) is the non-place of the soul, of joy, the balance of truths and the acceptance of mystery, the correspondence beyond all mere and sterile appearances; fullness in which opposites converge and reunite in harmonious unity, outside of time, outside of space, the achievement of a humility that is love and recognition of the other.
"I only know / that now that place is here, / in these few verses. / Fierce as a fist / sweet as a caress."
Angelucci knows and in writing communicates the everlasting joy that illuminates and permeates life, the beauty that is reserved by truth for all, with the awareness of the need to preserve and persevere - "Every egg is made to open" -, in the comfort/invitation of natural living, with passion and trust in the human, he reinvents hope for us, the larval light of beauty and planning.
"In the secret space of our approaching being,
I believe there is no true poetry today that does not seek and does not intend to seek,
until its last breath, to found a new hope".
Yves Bonnefoy
"We are flashes / in the infinite night / of billions and billions of stars".
Not fleeting flashes of an imperishable and already divine love.
May the man, the poet, always go through life, through loss, through the uncertainty inherent in the journey - "I did not know / that to believe means to suffer / with a smile / that rips your heart open" - not doubting the good and the possibility of balance, of the grace inherent in man and in the universe and, having reached the moment of balance, counting and saying "I have won as much as I have lost. / As much as I have lost. / That's good. / Woe betide if I found myself in deficit / or in surplus" if consciously, lucidly he has lived in trusting honesty - "I prefer to prick myself / passing through brambles, among thorns. / And to come out, at last, with my wounds / healed in the Sun". Shining in the sun.
A living sun in the serene and beyond the clouds, a warm sun for all creatures. A capital Sun, always.
Titiwai. "One, only one / is the road traced by life". To wonder, to love, to shine.
Valeria Spallino
2021.03