Books / “Beyond time” by Orazio Messina, in search of a metaphysical and abstract elsewhere

Collection “Beyond the time” it is the first anthology of poetic compositions by the writer Orazio Messina, author for years of verses in the vernacular and later in Italian.

The collection consists of an introductory poem, entitled “The flowerbed”, in a liminal position, and, following, three sections, entitled respectively Heart seeds, Seeds of the mind And Cunts and feelingsthe latter written in that dialect so dear to the author.

The first poem, on the Montalian model, takes on a double value: that of an introduction, by way of a long miniature, of the ideal elements of the collection, and of a dedication in the form of verses toassociation “I Vulcanici”.

The search for signs that allow the human being to overcome the narrow “flowerbed” in which he is trapped in order to escape, both with thought and with the word, which is an imperfect translation, into imaginative elsewhere which, in our opinion, does not appear to be evident, appears evident. mine, the taste of transcendence but, if anything, of overcoming the limit, the threshold. A metaphysical and abstract elsewhere, but not religious.

Thus, the poem “Accanto” seems to have its roots in that archetypal territory which is the indefinite, in an unconscious desire for primordial purity and freedom from the limited spaces that Leopardi had transfused so well into his songs.

And the insistence of the word evocative of a “distant” elsewhere in an epiphoric position and the antithesis at the end of the verse with the word “near”, the nuance of the visual and auditory dimension, almost synesthetic, and the centrality of the aquatic element (the sea, for example, in It was the sea), which has always been an expression of metamorphism and the search for female embraces, are emblematic of an investigation aimed towards the Beyond, towards the island that does not exist.
And which we can nevertheless identify in our imagination, the only true enjoyment of the soul. Or perhaps, who knows?, in synchronicity that only the poet-seer can perceive. Thus the earth is colored with immanence but, at the same time, potentially becomes a container of the Absolute.

Another dominant theme is that of the tormented love of those who cannot see the feeling grow, or the elusive love of a woman who sometimes seems to escape the caress and only rarely abandon herself to it, a metaphor of a precarious and doubtful vitalism. An elusive presence like D’Annunzio’s Summer.

And if the first part turns towards individual feelings, often imbued with anxious anticipation, the second seems to open up to a sociological analysis, as in “Emotion” where naturalness is trampled by an “artificial” modernity of “astonished faces of mannequins” , emblems of lost identities that “shout nothingness to nothingness”.

Then a caress: that, yes, human, and the emotion of the “magical connection”. And here too there is indeterminacy, expressed through the verbal infinity of so much literary tradition. The epiphanies contribute to the creation of a suspended time: “a friendly tree/ a house at the end of the avenue/ a penitent night” or even “the light of an awaited dawn. Images of sunsets and rebirths. Of hope, despite everything.

Annamaria Zizza