Cast Poetry in the Footsteps of a Woman Who Is Walking
(“I quaderni del Bardo Edizioni di Stefano Donno”, August 2018, e-book) is the
title of Elisa Longo’s first book of poetry, and it’s just enough to evoke the
author’s poetics: poetry doesn’t only mean “to make”– the Greek verb ποιέω (poiéo) –, it also means “to be”, and not only an
idea, an image, an emotion recalled by a spot of color on paper, but much more,
it’s an object on fire that must be handled, it’s a thing that scratches, blows
and cuts and eventually, maybe, it makes you fall in love in the way one of
Marina Abramović’s performances can.
Elisa Longo’s lines have the long breath of wheat
which ripens at every new reading. They are soft like the flour which makes
bread rise. They are also rough as an iron blade which is rusting under the
rain, the sickle with no handle which has just reaped the field. But that blade
is already blunt and described in the minutest of details, it’s a free line but
forced by the limits of its own body, and palpable as the flesh which wants to
blow up in the mind for falling back new in the hands. This book is a journey
into the world of a dynamic and fundamental poetess; Elisa Longo’s lines are a
boiling magma, a river of words in ongoing transformation; as a whole they are
objective sedimentations taking on density and give us the weight of their
presence without any compromise; they are the reflection of their own author,
as her significant epigraph explains.
From the Introduction signed by Riccardo Giuseppe
Mereu
On encountering Elisa Longo’s poems, the collection
title makes an energetic first impression: poetry is cast into a woman’s
footstep. Poetry, therefore, is something concrete, which doesn’t need handling
with care. Quite the contrary: it needs (or shall we say ‘it gives’?) strength.
Energy. Life. And it is cast into a woman’s footstep. This woman is walking. In
the poet’s view, women are the future: thus, this future is definitely on the
go. Just like trees do, these poems look upwards, towards the sky, towards
Life. They show the poet’s soul, and touch the reader’s. On a final note, let
us go back to the collection title, to poetry cast into a woman’s footstep. The
English language gives it an added value: true, we can cast objects. But
somebody (poets, certainly) can also cast a spell. Let us then surrender to the
magic of the title, and see where these poetic footsteps lead us.
From the Postscript signed by Raffaella Ticozzi
Photo cover Joe Beck on unsplash
Cura editorial
Valentina Sansò
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