Roberta Bertozzi interno 38

 

Il rituale della neve (The ritual of snow)
with an introduction by Cesare Ricciotti
Raffaelli Editore, Rimini 2003

*

everybody is somewhere now
even the drains regurgitate
the piston of the world
now everybody leaves behind
the turmoil
in a rush opposed to the sunset.
Here resist the delicacies
that do not nose about
do not focalize.
They stand staggered in the time’s passing,
it is embarrassing to me
their silent activity.

*

everywhere everything penetrates us
with those hollow orbits of the statues
the car lights, certain lowered eyelids
at the window
everywhere the sky is on rent
everywhere is storm, last stop, lost departure,
everywhere the world could do without us
and proceed,
everywhere identical food, early morning and night,
rewards, death and then us
always asking for indemnity for something
that perhaps was not.

 

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[...] Yet, after pages and pages made of serum and coral, lies take over again, similar to a moray eel. I do my best to find a way out in this labyrinth of echoes and reflections that blur my sight, but there is no mechanical device that can sort out my fears. Roberta’s poetry comes back as little exclamations, they imploringly drop into an unnoticed structure, urging me not to fall once again into the trap of this venomous flower “hanging in the air”.
Her quest is a superior one, the display of a series of details without any symbols or any magic, but with rather a force regulated from the inside, one which gives poetry a little, even minimal but solid idea of the subtle enchantment of a great, mysterious harmony. What a peace and serenity does she instil; she calls upon the whole of writing features, pushing them to merge and to forge recognition. We, being children among objects, in the same way as this laid stone, confer a true meaning to the presence telling us that life indeed exists.

Cesare Ricciotti

What is left is always the pain of loss, a penalty of desire that prevents from accomplishing one’s own presence, both as an individual and as history. Therefore the poetry of this author restarts from that loss as if it was a hunger and, by making it a positive one, she offers it as the epistemological basis and principle of knowledge. She almost seems to tell us, in many of her poems, that it is only by living through this loss, by almost creating it, can we start again to understand both each other and the world.

Gianfranco Lauretano

The poetry of Roberta Bertozzi is persistently focused on the idea of mystery and of its decoding. Yet, as this elucidating activity, together with an even earlier act of inquiry, both experience the relentless, tireless digging through the word, any new element that one is given further complicates the solution of the mystery by magnifying the discourse; what is discovered, therefore, increases the prismatic facets of a poetry that stays solidly anchored to the necessity of a transversal articulation, and that precisely appears as more determined and sharper.

Fabio Orrico

Roberta’s poetry contains much tension, one that aims at reaching life, its freshness, its imperfect and inconclusive nature. Life is like the non-written, like everything that stays out of the typographical interchange of fullness and emptiness, something that calls for strong attention, as if it was some enchantment of which one can lose track at each step made.

Vanessa Sorrentino

These are cautious but soft gazes: they are marked with the pangs of scepsis, escape the evidence of dogma, of triviality and of a fully explained logic; instead, they keep protecting the uncompleted, the dark zones, the shadows and the secret lacerations where an answer may perhaps dwell.

Alessandra Paganardi

In these poems both the powerful charm of nature’s fertility and the contemplation of the creation’s multicolour diversity are confirmed by a tensely existential and psychological meditation.

Matteo Veronesi

In Il rituale della neve Roberta Bertozzi provides a poetry that is endowed with remarkable rhetorical and linguistic skills, and is naturally inclined to proportion and measure, two qualities which one indeed misses nowadays.

Sandro Montalto