The interrupted memory (Manni, pp. 112, euro 16) by the Jungian psychoanalyst Augusto Romano is placed in the more than consolidated modules of the lyric tradition, not only Italian, which foresee the absolute protagonist of the ego in love, rather than love, for which the woman is the figure of reaction, projective screen of the male self, while poetry is the “sound”, to quote Petrarch, of those alternating joys and sufferings, it is their repair and sublimated fruit. In fact, the heart section of the collection is called Madrigali, marking the amorous ceremoniality of the short free verse compositions.
In our case, what thickens the picture is the underlining of the fact that the memorization of the ego occurs by feeling that “death awaits us / behind the screen”.
An accentuation of the approach of death also due to the circumstance that the meditation of the harvest takes place after the death of the beloved: “flow of earth and water”.
TRADITIONAL WAR However, the interior of opposing feelings has in Romano’s poetry particular arching and timbre which are indebted, in some of their aspects, to the professional culture of the author. In fact, although the perception of the beloved’s death becomes prevalent towards the end of the first and most important section, the two temporal planes, of the death that has occurred and of life in the remembered time, remain constantly coplanar. The fragments of experience burst into the present of the narrative with an erotic force that the interruption of death has not extinguished, mixing, as happens in certain hallucinations, with the same effect of reality.
THE SAME WAY, amorous transport constantly has frank physical, erotic connotations with not uncommon recourse to the naming of sexual organs. The same painful contrast of acceptance / rejection of the beloved, also due to her death, now turns into the aggressiveness of the woman «The thorny labyrinths / hidden between your legs / hid cypresses and altarpieces», now into passivity : «oh your winter eyes / regrettable courtesan / suppliant and leathery gray of a lost dove».
THE STRUCTURE rhythmic-metric does not differ from a grammaticalized mediocrity: recourse to free verse of short measures, rare occasional rhymes with some preference for the place at the end, abolition of punctuation except for the final full stop. Conditions for which that apparent semantic thickening occurs due to the absence of syntactic boundary markings in the body of the sequence and the verse.
But the energy of the conflict is innervated on other levels. The linguistic contrast between sounds, images, topoi, myths of literary ancestry and instead colloquial and technical fragments is sensitive, with dampening effects sometimes played on veils of Gozzanian comedy. An example is offered to us precisely by the contrast between the harsh drama of the “thorny labyrinths” reported above with the sudden closure: “It was cold and I / chattering my teeth waited / for you to take off your underwear”.
In other cases, the burden of anguish generated by the memory is faced on the contrary with a real freezing, brought to the point of sadism. More rarely, the pain of emptiness, the pressure of nostalgia find almost confident paths, perhaps through movements of literary echoes: «how the days are linked / how, with the oily saliva the mucus / the clouded gaze of the incipient night / how, with your slender legs, your pubis”, in whose anxious interrogation one seems to sense the bass of the insistent anaphora of François Villon’s poignant, unforgettable ballad, “mais où sont les neiges d’antan?”.
THE EXASPERATION of the conflict, which takes the form of both crude linguistic mixing and displacement caused by the fusion of temporal planes, is also reverberated in the rhetorical use of analogy sometimes carried to the verticality of figurations of arduous symbolism, not foreign to psychoanalytic derivation: « they rang at the door / flashes and sounds in the closets / of ripe feces”.
