by Antonio Devicienti

Do not read The Empire That Is Silent (Borgomanero, Giuliano Ladolfi Editore, 2019) as a book of poetry or, worse still, of poetic prose.

Read it, instead, as a run-in of the breath and with a run-up of the breath, with the certainty that the language is capable of inventing worlds and that the violent ugliness of the so-called real gets stuck and is in trouble and turns out even more (dangerously) stupid and unjust if it breaks away from a book like this.

Go along it with your hands and feet that have the sky as an abyss (remember Paul Celan and the Darmstadt speech?), Entering it as in an oblong gazebo (remember the invitation that Antonio Leonardo Verri addressed to poets?), Feeling in the flesh the exile and its privileges.

It is touched in its numerous uncovered nerves that vibrate in the resonance chamber of language and travel, readings and epoch (the present one, also dog-wolf), in its long (very long), painful (painful) gestation , in its striving from the verse to the other, because here the verse expands and lasts whole pages, breath and anxiety to say, version of Ilaria and continuous inversion of thought-writing.

We cross it by taking in the mind Figura (another very recent risk of language and oversea) of Paolo Fichera and Venenum of Giorgino, Pagano, Truglia, cradling next always a trobar leu of fraternal complicity, of obvious substantial alliance.

You swim like swirling water, like the Adriatic and Ionian Salento, like Lecce stone so tender and malleable and crumbly that it is the sister of the water from which it emerged to build itself a city of visions (in the Empire of Hilary the vision justifies the saying, saying justifies the vision, the geographical plots of a beloved and tragic Europe intertwine and come back to melt, unchanging continuous change).

We rewrite it page after page by copying it word by word as it is for each coat of arms codicum: derive a code from the other, a reading from the other, a place from the previous one in which one was, but also in which one was not: the marking of the one that has not yet been read, not yet written, not yet seen is deeply engraved in the visa, in the bed, in the writing.

You travel it because, Ilaria tells me, we are by now used to "simple readings, simplified plots" and she fears that few will understand it: we travel just because we refuse, we decisively reject simplified plots, simple readings, distracted and comforting readings, because this is, perhaps, a book for the happy few, where happy means available to an arduous adventure and at times painful, not pacified with the world, but aware that the world can also be a blade cut that never heals.

It is squared up in the light of uneasy suns capable of rising up on horizons of melancholy and joy, of nostalgia and expectation, and in the light of moons littered by the enigma and the distance, the removal and abandonment.

Take it with you as a sign of sisterhood and brotherhood with thousands of excluded and offended people, including those illiterates who, on the other hand, possess a wisdom born of their very human Franciscan simplicitas.

But it must also be guided by a true, sincere, never fake, never simulated docta ignorantia (punishment, to pretend, a squalid wandering through plastic and faded territories).