Poems to counteract a deafening absence

When the will to justify through logical connections the evident collapse of the social fabric fails, or worse, is no longer credible, a lyrical transfiguration of the crisis, 'In absentia' (Interlinea, 2025, pp. 96, euro 14), is opposed. Out of the din of a twenty-year period given over to appearances, Alessandro Canzian's new collection, in which the viral decadence spreads from the fundamentals of language to a more organic individual dimension, to an idealised collectivity, to a Europe that does not exist, is born. 'In absentia' is among the novelties that the Novara-based publishing house presented at the Turin Book Fair to celebrate its 30th anniversary.

The book's tripartite layout - "Minimalia", "Sul fondo", "In absentia" - connotes brevity not as an expressive shortcut, but as a field of tension between attention and absence, oscillating between the need to confess to the other, to the salvific stranger, and the reticence of not living up to one's own expectations. Reduced to the bone and rendered inescapable, the poetic word captures both the minimal details and the major spectres - historical and moral - that determine the horizon of a subjectivity that is multiple, but lacks a centred and substantially fragile identity. "He has all his teeth broken / like an old man in the mountains / under the bombing / there is no point in wondering about the end".

According to critic Martin Rueff, who signed the afterword, Canzian resolves in five geometric verses to oppose the first three denotative verses to a deliberately decisive closure on a par with fate, or rather, "unexpected and disturbing", as Valerio Magrelli called it. It is no coincidence that the poems function as "small dramatic devices" that alternate what is observed with what that sight grants, always associating the sensitive with the imaginative. It is a strategy that directly confronts the paradoxical ecphrasis of 'Exfanzia', which is as much about condensing as it is about stripping away realistic features. "An authentic metropolitan and everyday poem, veined with the violence of European history," Magrelli commented on Canziani's work.

With 'Minimalia', a title that syncretizes and chokes those Adornian 'Minima moralia' that did not hold up in the face of the late twentieth-century cult of the ephemeral, the Friulian poet places himself between the gesture of implicit denunciation and the fetishism of the particular. Moreover, the two poles of his poetics coexist here: photographic description and symbolic drift. The old man who cuts the grass or the little girl who "will solve all his problems / by drinking ammonia" are symptoms and icons, at the same time, of a social fabric that has stopped believing in meanings and has surrendered to the screen of the present. They are the 'clinical cases' of a world that has lost the links of cause and effect.

Alessandro Canzian, In absentia, Interlinea, pp. 96, euro 14