N. PARDINI LAW: "PIETRA E FARFALLA" BY PAOLO MAZZOCCHINI
Paolo Mazzocchini. Stone and butterfly. Giuliano Ladolfi Editore. Borgomanero, (NO). Pages 80. € 10.00
This is the eponymous poetry that allows us to immediately enter into the complex empathic-reflective mechanism of the poet: "weight-longevity, the butterfly, suspended beating, fugitive rest, pésa almost eternity". Art, escape from materialism towards spirituality, comparison between the hardness of the stone and the lightness of the butterfly: the desire to detach from the ground to access the light of the mysteries, even for a moment, as a flight of the fragile bird. The whole work of Paolo Mazzocchini plays on this oxymoric and extremely metaphorical picture: doubts, uncertainties, resistance of matter, paralysis of weight; light, flight, spirit, soul, graceful rest of poetry.
An intense, honest, ample plot of epigrammatic existential excavation, where the verb, with extensions of synaesthetic allusion, and of metaphorical inclusion, tries to catch the flights of a mind all the time to give impossible explanations; to reach difficult-to-reach goals. The verse unfolds on paths now of contracting effect, also dry, now of extensive effect, where the poetic dictate seems to abandon itself to a form of prose narrative, so much is the human substance, which, in need of space, from the inside would like to go out for demonstrate the restlessness of existing. Stone and butterfly, the dual title of this plaquette that with bold vicissitudinal impacts brings with it the haunted search of a man, a thinker, who is not content to read the world as it appears in its icasticity; it wants to go to the bottom of the question, of living, of being there, of thanatos and eros, of all that this involves our existence. And it does so with a sharp, articulate, dense linguism that so much recalls the verbality of our ancestors of the Latins; of a classicism that does not seem in disuse at all, but relives with skill under the pen of an author who makes of his humanistic world, of his cultural knowledge, the support plan for often inhumane outbursts for their speculative intensity; for their gamble in translating into a being that is not content with living hic et nunc without travails; without disquiet because of his precariousness as an individual subject to time and the transience of the terrain; the futility of a stay; he would like to touch the sky, rise above the horizons to discover, know, identify, dissolve the tangle of the skein; untangle the knot that holds the mystery of life. But the fact is that man is full of terrestriality; his feet sink into the soil of the plane, the hills, or into the waters of the rivers and seas; the sky is up there looking at us almost with detachment. Here are the doubts, the uncertainties, the many questions without solution, the many questions that the poet poses, aware of their dissolution. A life of poetry a poetry of life that of Mazzocchini. And life involves the sad and very painful sequence of days: the thought of a time lent by death. The poet seems to react to this condition, taking refuge in sarcasm, in irony, not as a simple reaction of a fedrian mold, but as a result of a human condition in the face of the inscrutability of the evolution of the whole. The poetics of ours are in this philosophy of life; in this game of phonosymbolism that stretches and farther, that is inhaled and bends to keep up with a succession of moods that tell us so much about human conditions in suspension. To put it to Hugo "The joy of being sad". If we can talk of joy in the world so problematic of Mazzocchini: one in which the only living being endowed with the thought of death, and the dilemma of the rien and tout, is precisely the man. In some moments we seem to discover a certain adhesion of the poet to the prosecution of the verse that has hegemonized the Italian poetry of the late twentieth century and of our days. But in this experimentation, where the objective correlative of the Eliotian mold is the master, I would certainly not place this poem: here meditation, thought, reflection, feeling are translated into highly subjective images to take on the form of lyricism in moments of greater inspiration, proving that every topic, even philosophical, once filtered by a soul cooked to perfection, can become poetry. And poetry is this of Mazzocchini, with all the ingredients that distinguish it; with that formal clarity and freedom of versification, where even the hemistichio makes its appearance in the division of the verse into a maiore and a minor: pause and restart towards the intricate paths of life. The fact is that in these expressive moments, in this Plurima noctis imago, or In magistri memoriam, In veritate amicitia, or Motu alien ..., in these brief and apodictic messages, where the obsessive play of the existence becomes concrete in a symbolic the most natural visual intrusion (night, Uranus, tamarisks, earth, cloud, mountain, sky, light, snow, stones ...), we discover a new poet, contents of a driving verticality:
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