«You ask me, what remains.
Really, I do not know.
Maybe the worm hole
in greasy and moist soil.
The lives of the saints and the rooms of the prisoners.
The days never equal to each other
always the same minutes of suffering [...] ».
(What remains, p. 47)
If the panorama of contemporary Italian poetry seems to languish, on the one hand for the age-old question of the elitism of poets, on the other hand, for an ephemeral success of hypermarket poets, whose writing quality is of an axiomatic mellifluence but which has met with the favor of the current mediocritas, there are (exist, believe me!) precious pearls, not so much hidden, which put the lifeblood into the lyrical veins of today. This, it should be emphasized, especially by small and medium-sized publishing houses, where poetry has long since found a home.
This is the case of E sia, the work of Grazia Procino, Giuliano Ladolfi Editore, 2019, a remarkable collection that corroborates, through its elegant classicism, our thesis, according to which good poetry is anything but expired but, to whom he knows where to look, he still gives moments of excellent literary bliss.
This collection, divided into sections that refer to the ancient Greek tragedy - prologue, stasms, monody, epilogue - of the drama also preserves the height and sine die depth of the classic feeling: «Incede distorted / blood is only torment / for the daughter of Hecuba, / punished by the god who loves poets. / Everyone looks at her / now that they know they were wrong / to mock her when she traced / wide and furious / the roads of the disaster [...] ». (Cassandra minor, p. 51). Grazia Procino weaves a plot full of pathos, where at the center of everything is the human being, with all its beauty and all its abyss. Reading these verses, one has the impression of being always on the road, through infinite circumnavigation, and of never definitively arriving in Ithaca. Yet, in the travail of a jagged and restless path, there are flashes of light that illuminate the hearts and minds: "You are my lifeboat, I am yours". (Pretext of Narcissus, p. 43). It is a joy to have met this little gem of contemporary poetry, since it is from unexpected - and lucky - encounters that often the most beautiful experiences of reading and cultural sharing originate. In our opinion, it is also important to bring attention to the author's language and poetic syntax, as the care of the form is not unrelated to the depth of the contents but, if possible, accentuates some passages: «In this gloomy silence I cradle / my tired bones resemble only themselves and are not capable, ouch, not yet, / to shake off the silver of the cobwebs [...] »(The interrupted song of the cicadas, p. 60) and more : "I don't know about love that high waves / and Odysseus who returns / to an Ithaca full of stones / rough and barren / the scent of the light sea that / intones nostalgia and robust desires". (Horizons, p. 66).
Poetry, therefore, cannot ignore the love of the word and the transit from the particular to the universal - under penalty of going beyond the personal diary or in an asphyxial format, similar to an aseptic journalistic reportage - and Grazia Procino seems to love the word high, the poet logos that appears as the only instrument capable of bringing together two apparently irreconcilable worlds: that of the human and that of the divine, the superhuman. Thus, in the elevated verses of E sia, the author gives us back some of the stolen, of what has been lost in the maze of the complacent and pretendly naive poetry of today's mainstream, or has dried up and impoverished - in the lexicon, in the figurations , in the depth of sounding - in certain pseudo-engaged apes in the civilian. Nonetheless, the author brings us the account of today's state of society, since, if the reading of the world that poets give is a litmus test of the times, the civic sense also moves between the high forms of the Procino poet and becomes a cry of pain: «[...] Is madness fatigue human? // I ask those who look the other way / And they don't want to see. / If God survives / he is certainly not here ». (Tomato picker in an Apulian countryside, p. 23).
Finally, I wish to greet the readers of Linea Carsica with this short and intense lyric, which still follows the path of restlessness within which the human is thrown:
«In front of the pain of those who drown
the flesh feels chills
cold
darkens the circle
it closes sterile.
The red flowers also fall
in the summer so the sunburn
to pain. I grew up.
The secrets of the acacia garden are ".
(Faced with pain, p. 53)