Verses of an Eternally Future Life That Suddenly Finds Itself Already in the Past

August 01, 2006 In his latest book Tema dell’addio (Farewell Theme, Mondadori), Milo De Angelis’ poetry has changed so much as to appear unrecognizable. Here was a poet inspired by an adolescence that was never entirely finished nor in the past, an adolescence that continued to speak to him in mythical enigmas. Now, after the premature death of his beloved wife, Giovanna Sicari, the poet, now over 50, encounters maturity as if he were encountering an assassin. Giovanna’s death is the event that frees the author from the hypnotic spell of possibility. The life that appeared to him to be eternally in the future suddenly reveals itself to be already in the past. What had remained magnetically fluid for decades is transformed by real tragedy into something solid and still.

From his debut in 1976 with Somiglianze (Resemblances), until Dove eravamo già stati (Where We Had Already Been) in 2001, Milo De Angelis remained that young poet in whom it was impossible not to believe, but who continued to chase the elusive ghost of a religion and a mysticism of life. He was the only true heir of the ‘Ermetismo’ school of poetry, even more serious and dramatic than his Florentine forefathers, because he acted without the consolation of culture and without, let’s say, the privileges of cast. Milo presented himself as a sick angel, a vulnerable pariah of poetry, exposed to all of the disorders of an incurable immaturity. The last time that I reviewed him, I remember suddenly feeling like an impatient older brother: decades would go by and he was always the same, true to himself, the same difficult boy on the doorstep threatening something obscurely definitive – an escape, a departure, an extreme act, a final judgement (paid for, however, with his own blood). He threatened this on the life of his parents and of every adult subjected to the principle of reality. Milo De Angelis had the air of a survivor who had seen an unspeakable truth, so unequivocal and unyielding as to stamp the mark of fatality on the boy’s face . But between the words and what was unsaid, a space of indefiniteness opened up. He did not use metaphors, his words were rather attempts at a diary, descriptions full of gaps, medical reports, and imperative approximations – tight-lipped exhortations whispered to himself to give shape to the shapeless, to remember all that it is impossible to record. Milo De Angelis’ ermetismo was a fact, a mental characteristic, not a form of culture. It was poetry as illness, like the continual premonition of happiness and death that resides in every millimetre and drop of life.


The colours and the party move into the past

Even in this latest book dedicated to Giovanna, we can find many verses that have a life of their own and tend to break off from the logic of speech. What is especially striking in the first section is that the metrical-graphic compactness of the texts, the pounding energy with which refrains, iterations, and masked anaphoras displaced here and there in the body of the verses, mark the points of departure of speech, supports and rafts for thought to cling to in order not to sink.

The verses are long and have similarly sized rhythmic units which compose blocks of writing similar to Amelia Rosselli’s Variazioni belliche. The random and unpredictable movement typical of De Angelis’ previous poetry has disappeared. It’s as if the vital or prenatal liquid in which the words and sentences swam, extending and contracting themselves with the agility of an aquatic, rather than land animal, had suddenly evaporated. Now the diary of impending death must battle a desert-like declarative aridity: “There is no more time (...) You had no more time (…) There was no more day (…) There was no more light.” The movement of the tongue stops and must begin again, each time confronted by the definitive obstacle, the limit beyond which everything finishes. Every promise and possibility becomes unthinkable. Time that passes is by now external and far away, it belongs to the history of a happiness that was announced by moving itself ever more into the future. But now the future is over. Every movement ahead has been interrupted and even language is paralyzed and contracted by the impossibility of thinking about life.