Poets are “thieves to whom God has entrusted the task of stealing the best of life”. This is how Jean-Marie Kerwich expresses himself consciously, certainly not presumptuously, he refers these words to himself. He identifies himself with the book he writes: he is a man who “becomes poetry”. A wandering book, for which there is no peace. Continuously in search of glimmers of beauty, continuously and brazenly in comparison with a world vulgarly devoted to banality.
He admits it: it’s not one of those books “that jostle on the shelves to be seen”. She comes from the heart: “the soul forces you to pick up the pen”, to look at life and the world with disenchanted eyes.
It is a book that lives on the essentials. A prose that tests the terrain of poetry and allows itself ferocious lashes, a poetic ferocity, on the writers of vain words, on the pages written with useless sentences. His “wandering book” is made up of notes and thoughts that are at first glance disconnected. Soon, however, the pieces find their place in the fabric of life.
Born into a family of Piedmontese gypsies, raised in the circus world, “son of the paths and roads”, the author makes marginalization his existential condition. He recalls Rimbaud, the “cursed poet”, sharing the subversive soul that is also found in Jean Genet: authors whose art is closely intertwined with life. And from this perspective it is not out of place to think back to the holy drinker in Joseph Roth’s novel.
In this position one feels “sublime refusal of being misunderstood and in revolt with the elegance of words”, because the true thinker “annoys the manufacturers of useless words”. Then the pages of the wandering book become rough with words that scratch the hypocrisy of the world, which “dirties life with ambitions and strong powers”, the false freedoms of the “sailing ships of the sea” or, again, the supermarkets, “new museums” for an increasingly obese and thoughtless world.
The author feels in tune with the rejected: “the little grass that grows out of the concrete”, the homeless man who warms up a can of beans, the unfortunate person hiding under a blanket next to a suitcase “where he has folded his life”. With a bold comparison he compares the photo of Bernadette Soubirous to the gypsy he met. Let’s not call them homeless, protests the author, “because their home exists: it is in the gaze of Jesus”.
Thus the “wandering book” pushes itself to the limits of faith, without ever going beyond them with conviction. He questions a God “who walks next to my shadow”, from whom he does not expect answers, but feels close to him in the figure of the Crucifix or Jesus “a beaten child like I was”.
The wandering book
by Jean-Marie Kerwick
Sanpino Publishing
13.5 euros
