LEGGERE DONNA , Year XXIX (n. 156)
New series n. 139, March-April 2009
Review by Nelvia Di Monte
The collection certainly impresses whoever chooses to read and to let himself getting involved by the estranging density of the eighteen sections that compound this long poem. The text continuously unravels through well recognisable thematic elements, such as: dialogues taken from everyday discourse, idioms, technical jargon, unusual associations, geographic and historical references, twisted versions of famous quotations, objective descriptions, personal remarks... Inside all this, everything suddenly transforms into a series of original images, by going through expressionistic, somewhat surreal distortions.
One can sense a bottom of tragedy in the collection’s setting out, almost as if a violence, similar to a fatal disease – or to a disability caused by a father to his sons, like in the legend to which the book refers – were jeopardising all potential chances for any individual, generational or social reconstruction.
Neither is allowed any linguistic reconstruction, as the poem’s language itself appears shattered and bewildered vis-à-vis the accidents of being. Language is the result of many signifying units that, by mingling and juxtaposing, subtract a wider meaning, by making it uncertain (“I was stopping the seed / before it could turn itself into sign”) or highlight how unsteady their conventionally assigned meanings are.
Here one feels the necessity to go over new roads in the way words relate to reality, in order to resist to the attempt of escaping the “ground from below”; one feels the need to address poetry otherwise and to “bring deeper / the fiction of text” in order to find the point/instant in which “meaning lessens / and the chant is / strangely / beautiful”. The individual subject who chooses to listen wants neither to simplify nor to establish any evaluating criteria to convey all the multiple sounds of life towards an exclusive significance.
Bertozzi’s poetics thus acts in a versatile way, by staging several linguistic elements at the same time in order to provoke a stereophony that distorts the homogeneity and clarity of communication, until this almost equals an impossible utopia. At the same time, the poet is strongly anchored to reality – though fluctuating this word may appear – and never loses sight of the ‘generative’ and corporeal matrix of her poetic praxis, the act of “putting back in the cell its generative // syllabic blood and another new one”. This seems to be the guideline sustaining the entire book: a grapple against writing, in which “words arranged in batteries of utterance / arm themselves” not to grasp reality in a mimesis that the short twentieth century has made impossible, yet in order to sever it and to “miss it completely”. This is no plain nor conciliatory poetry, it rather drives one – in a disorienting way – to reflect upon the problematic complexity that threatens to crush the individual man or woman in their social and communicative states of being. The constant presence of references to intersubjective scopes allows poetry not to close itself inside a sterile experimentalism which would stand for itself: two elements – the self and the world – reciprocally interpenetrate, yet they do this with a continuous expressive tension that does not allow any balance and that rarely offers breaks of quietness. As if one were observing a collage of known pictures rapidly passing by (war, social inequalities, illness, prevarication marked by normality, “the kidnapping of everyday life”…), one perceives how the actuality of the beginning of this century has been distorted by a horizon of absurdities: is this reality the generational ‘capital’ inherited from the fathers? If this is the case, it is indeed better to crush and miss completely such a reality, because it makes no sense and it does not possess any plot of words able to reconstruct it in a whole, rightful image. And yet, this does not mean to let oneself glide into a lair of nihilism; it rather means to look for something “that is not in place, a signal”. The writing of Roberta Bertozzi carves itself into the depths and engenders a painful, yet necessary operation aimed at revealing what is left of humanity, its survived traces: “it is continuous / leafing through hardness to the flint / examining every vein / so that nothing may be neglected, / father”.
