[translated by Google]
"The second birth" (Giuliano Ladolfi publisher) is the third collection of verses published in December 2017 by Fabiano Spessi after "The art of meeting" (2015) and "A promise of happiness" (2016), already reviewed on the pages of Barbadillo, and can be considered the third part of a trilogy. Let's start with the title: the second birth alludes to a season that closes and another season that opens. And indeed we perceive in this work a marked change of stylistic register. To predominate are no longer the vivid and sometimes ironic portraits of men and women humiliated and offended by a pathogenic society, which puts the economy above all else, but the reference to a generic, indistinct "you" ("it's hot and rainy / but you do not seek shelter / because, tonight, there is no shelter "in the last day of summer" when you were just a boy / nice new houses "in Boy band, etc.). On the plain discursiveness of the first two collections there is a more involuntary discourse, "Pasolinian", the verse tends to slide towards prose, sometimes towards the prosaic, as for example the persistent recourse to English expressions not always functional to the poetic context.
Of what at first seems an exhaustion of the poetic vein is aware of the same Spessi that with great honesty, in the note placed at the conclusion of the collection, declares that this poetic path has ended and that he feels the urgency and the need to experiment with "new and different expressive formulas". (P.72). Certainly there are the characters described with a happy touch, like the intern who "discovers not to be younger" (in Lo stagista 40); or like Martino, who is admitted to the clinic in order to lose weight, in front of a "beautiful nurse" the only bite that he can try is that of hunger (in Liposuction); or like the poet with the sweet life that "is so hermetic / that only those / of his court understand him" (in Il poeta con il dolce vita nero). But it is felt that the accent beats elsewhere, even though Spessi's poetry is a critical and compassionate mirror of a way of life that hinges on precariousness, loneliness, on the inert despair, often induced by the badly absorbed new technologies and intrusive.
In this sense, the following text is emblematic:
GLI SPIETATI
Alzi il bavero della giacca
per difenderti dal primo freddo
dell’anno. Nel tuo quartiere
tutto tace, si impone una pace
prodigiosa nelle ore del dopocena.
Sarebbe il momento di rincasare,
ma ti attardi ancora per le strade
perché ti piace l’idea di scomparire
lentamente nel crepuscolo
come l’eroe di un western
di Clint Eastwood.
Therefore, "The second birth" is not a complete work overall, but rather a work of passage with its shaded areas and its lights. Among the latter, we should mention the one that, in our opinion, is the best poetry of the collection, where lyrical grace fits perfectly with the disenchanted eye of the poet who, in the words of Susan Sontag, pays attention to the world:
IL CIELO SOPRA BERLINO
Le prime luci dell’alba
strappano al sonno gli angeli che
scendono dalle panchine del parco
non visti da anima viva, giusto qualche
cane a passeggio ne percepisce la presenza,
avverte lo spostamento d’aria. Entrano nei
bar per ascoltare i discorsi delle infermiere
e degli autisti d’autobus e poi montano in
servizio con la grazia innaturale del volo.