Roberta Bertozzi interno 38

A few notes on the poetry of Alessandro Ceni
in ATELIER
quarterly review of poetry, criticism, literature
n. 59, september 2010

abstract

The distinctive feature of Alessandro Ceni’s poetry is given by an extensive use of figures of speech that embody both movements and state variations: metaphors and metonymies are acting as true verse-forming engines, to the point that every single image seems to flow into the next one, while building another image’s headway through a sequence of transitions that ultimately create an ever-changing poetic wholeness.
The stylistic motivations behind such creation are completely consistent with and needed by the contents of Ceni’s works: the metaphoric flow becomes both a symptom and a mould of a peculiar perception of reality, as it wants to reproduce reality’s process – a kind of reality experienced as a mechanical sequence of ancestral forces, as a proliferation of things, figures, of multilayered and mutually correlated eras that go through multiple changes; such realities are nearly captured by a vortex-like superior movement that collects every vision and every phase, while advancing towards a cohesion of the whole.
The described cosmos is thoroughly shattered, as well as urged by a continuous transfiguration: within such scenario, the individual voice tends to melt and eclipse – the single person merges with the continuity of the entire species, whether this is organic or inorganic, as every being mixes itself with its promiscuous background and dissolves itself into a biological pressure that drags it away.
Nonetheless, this is one dimension that grants nothing to pandeism, nor does it descend from a Orphic-like visionary and moulding practice; it rather proposes itself as the result of a perspective revolution, as well as of its inevitable acknowledgment – as the lucid ascertainment of the changing relationship between the subject and the objective universe. It is such relationship that Ceni mimetically and abruptly translates for us.
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