April is the most poetic of months
From the Premio Strega dozen to the kermesse, the books that make prophecy and those to be forgotten
The fateful dozen of candidates for the third edition of the Premio Strega Poesia now serves as a watershed in terms of what new things to look out for. Certainly, Federico Italiano's latest collection, 'Godzilla' (Guanda), allows the reader no escape route in the face of an increasingly aberrant social reality, devoured by uncertainties, false myths and nonsense. "As much as the reference is deliberately pop," comments Mario Santagostini, director of the series in verse, "films dedicated to the demonic creature have nothing to do with it. Italia critically traverses its time, dissipating all imaginative consolation with the inexorable pace of endecasyllables, and interweaving collective trauma with the cultural construct of the monstrous".
A pact of truth
A mythical nucleus in close contact with the present constitutes the dynamic framework of Carmen Gallo's 'Procne Machine' (Einaudi), a volume capable of producing associations, of retracing epochs and linguistic approaches that are apparently disparate. At the centre of this symbolic operation, Gallo places the dimension of violence: 'He cut off the root of her language with his sword'. The mythical core, articulated between rape, mutilation and consequent revenge, makes it possible to highlight the persistence of forms of oppression in history. The figure of Philomela, deprived of her voice, becomes an emblem of a silencing that goes beyond a dated context to extend to the current political level, in which the denial of speech confirms itself as one of the most radical drifts of domination.
Stratified time
