The Restlessness of the Vision

January 18, 2006 Born in 1968, Andrea Raos belongs to the generation of poets who started their activity in the mid-1990s, while critics were mainly interested in ambitious end-of-the-century considerations. It is no accident that his first collection of poetry, Discendere il fiume calmo, was published in the Quinto quaderno italiano, edited by Franco Buffoni (Crocetti, 1996), that is, the only review whose aim it is to methodically analyse the group of younger Italian poets. Thanks to Buffoni’s efforts it is now possible to trace a common pattern among the 30 to 40 years-old Italian poets, despite the widespread indifference of a large part of the critics. In 2003 Raos published the collection of poetry Aspettami, dice (Pieraldo Editore).

This volume includes poems written in the course of a decade, organized more thematically than chronologically. The volume’s structure is therefore composite, and contains poems of various styles: sonnets, blank verse poems, one or two-line poems as well as very dense pieces of prose. This absolute stylistic ‘restlessness’ never lapses into expressly informal tendencies, since the author constantly checks every combination of forms, both on the single text and on the whole collection. The style is unvarying in all the poems: an expression of a reasoned estrangement. Musicality is pursued and provoked in every line, but always indirectly, by using inner or unexpected rhymes, assonance, repetition.

Raos’ language is immediately striking because of the text’s sharpness as well as the ever so arduous and laborious construction of the image. The formal style and the hyper-literariness of the language never allow the presence of everyday life and ordinary objects, nor prose-like tendencies: the world of experience is examined in every detail, in order to obtain a terse, flexible and purified substance. Every waste product deriving from experience is taken out of its context and preserved for a long time to create a fixed, versatile expression that can transform a shapeless emotional stream into different sounds and meanings.

The inclination for abstraction constantly breaks every lyrical tendency, aiming not at parodying it, but at purifying it of biographic and temporal elements.

From the very beginning, Raos’ poetry has shown an undoubted technical skill, which sometimes becomes virtuosity. But this poetry isn’t free of self-gratification, where the author’s attention seems to be exhausting itself in the construction of a sophisticated and evocative verbal form, which is yet unable to represent the real world. In such cases, the linguistic object (or extra-text) appears distant or even nonexistent. But more frequently the poet achieves his aim, which is not to give up representing the world, but to reorganize that same vision, following unpredictable glimpses and movements.

The object is less important because the creative process focuses on the different ways to show it in perspective. The stylistic restlessness reveals itself on a thematic level and represents a constant need to analyse the world and its richness of breadth. Experience, as an accidental and biographical element, is less important than the possibility of transforming it by viewing it from a new angle. In fact, it is the emotional intensity of certain direct traumatic events that provokes the author’s need for unusual points of view. In the section ‘Distruzione, eco’, written after his father’s death, we can read:

Ho, ben sai, crudeltà bastante, pure          I am – as you know – sufficiently merciless, yet
mai ti immaginai campo di ghiaccio           I never figured you – a field covered with ice
chine le foglie al soffio, tu stormire           leaves bent under the wind, you – a hoarse
rauco nel bosco di cannule e timer,            rustling of reed and timer in a wood,

i contatori abbarbicati ai solchi                  electricity meters clung to the tubular
tubolari nei due bracci, grida                      furrows in their bars; drawn,
verdi, disegnate, delle arterie                      green cries of wounded
ferite a simulare ogni singulto,                   arteries which feign every sob,
gli sbalzi vascolari: tic tic tic.                     the vascular jumps: tick tick tick.

In conclusion, one might ask how this collection takes its place among contemporary Italian poetry. I see at least one feature that, even if it is not a prerogative of Raos’ poetry, certainly represents an important achievement for the genre.

It is the decision to break free from mannerism, which has become in recent years a kind of ‘natural’ horizon for poetry. With this word I mean above all a disregard for possible stylistic and thematic innovations. This is linked to an unaware pliability towards the metrical and stylistic repertoires of our tradition. According to today’s mannerist, the boundaries of poetic language can be traced in different ways, but they are definitively established: authors, with their natural arrogance, are rarely inclined to rearrange these boundaries following unexpected perspectives.

Nevertheless I believe that this brief definition of mannerism needs to be completed by another definition. I found it in a brief but dense essay by Stefano Dal Bianco, Lo stile classico, published in 1995 (in La parola ritrovata. Ultime tendenze della poesia italiana, Marsilio). Dal Bianco connects modern mannerism mainly with the presumptuousness of individual style. In his classicistic vision, protecting the strength of style and its “demand for communication” implies a “style as a refusal of style”. I think that, apart from the classicistic principle, Dal Bianco’s suggestion is significant. And this is evidenced in Raos’ work. Here the refusal of individual style gives voice to a hidden experimentalism, which never tries to sever the link with literary heritage in all its richness. He makes no attempt to achieve a natural language, in conformity with an essentiality of things observed through an independent and absolute sensitivity.

Raos uses forms and language in a hypothetical way, because we cannot assure that poetry leads beyond itself, towards the identification of essential experiences. This kind of skepticism does not imply the acceptance of a hyper-literary game with an end in itself. It is rather a constant commitment to finding a vision of reality through the means of instruments offered by poetic institutions, which are considered a point of departure of the individual expressive process, not a final destination.


Translated by Berenice Cocciolillo and Maria Giannini

Originally published in Semicerchio. Rivista di poesia comparata XXX-XXXI, 2004, p. 141.