MAPS WITHOUT A LAND | LiteratureNews

“Maps without a land” by Antonio Bux (RP libri) – poems

(Strega Poetry Prize Finalist 2024)

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by Helena Molinari

“But I write poetry
I don’t know how to change…”

Antonio Bux (Foggia 1982) is an editor and translator, but above all else he is a poet and could not be or write anything else.
It cannot change.

“If you think about the sea
the sea becomes…”

“Maps without a land” collection of poems published by Rp libri in May 2023, also a finalist for the 2024 Strega – Poetry Prize, it is the gaze that becomes landscape.
He is powerful, spiritual even in blasphemy.
It is a liquid collection of so much sea.
It is solid with few things, old and new.
Straight as salt.
Yet in the vertigo that moves us inside reading it, closing it and reopening it as one does with mood and doors; we find such a truth that we cannot do without it.

It is in fact and deservedly a book between “earth and sky”.
It’s right for us… BUT the soil here is almost always earth-colored. It’s unpaved and uncomfortable. The swollen sky is “a sky of kicks” and sometimes free of a single light.

The light is that of the south and is different from any other light.

Bux’s poetry is the journey and place of the poet himself, but it is never departure and arrival.
If anything, it’s more like the relay of life to a better life. It is also the non-place, where we don’t know, but everything that has broken or we have broken will be fixed.

” … The tombs
on Sunday they breathe, they go out
the whites outside the rosettes,
the understandings of all lands
and the fatigue of dying; how hard it is
knowing that you die with difficulty,
that people tire of death.”

The collection is Puglia.
The collection is Spain.

And the story broken down is myth and reality.
And those who are no longer there return.
And the “flying fish”.

Reading this book means getting lost and looking for yourself.

It is rare poetry.
Rare poetry.
From the insides up.

Put your seat belts on.
Enjoy the reading.

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The anthology sheet: “Maps without a land” by Antonio Bux (RP libri)

Book included in the dozen finalists of the 2024 Strega Poetry Prize

Does this work by Antonio Bux seem to arise from necessity? of the author to put into verse his own life experience starting from his youth (spent in his native land of Capitanata) up to his adulthood, spent for the most part in the areas of Catalonia. AND? therefore an anthology that processes its existential watermark in a continuous and perpetual nostos, realizing its own philosophy of thought through the landscape and the places frequented by the poet. Landscape which, in this case, becomes a pretext for disappearance, in perfect symbiosis with the progression/regression of human experience. Therefore, a sort of dreamlike and metaphysical existential mapping apparently experienced without a real land of belonging, rather as a continuous destination that has its destination in the origin. This trip is? journey together with ghosts, echoes, visions, introspections and geographies, both physical and spiritual, seeking, precisely, that dialogue, possible and impossible at the same time, with an “other” dimension which is? once again the landscape (shared with those who live or have lived there) in all its forms and nuances, making yes? that it becomes a passing of the baton between who is it? been on this earth and who is there? now and one day it will reflect its own disappearance to others.

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Antonio Bux (Foggia, 1982) is an author, editor and translator. He has published, among others, Trilogia dello zero (Marco Saya, 2012), Naturario (Di Felice, 2016), Rock, paper and scissors, (Avagliano, 2018), The shadow dam (Nottetempo, 2020), Diary of the intruder (Marco Saya, 2022), False Gemello (Avagliano, 2022) and Maps without a land (RPlibri, 2023). He has also published three books in Spanish and two in the Foggia dialect. He writes about literary criticism for the pages of the newspaper “La Repubblica” (Bari edition) and directs various series of poetry and poetic prose.

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