For “his heart too much of a storyteller”, that of the great Calabrese poet Franco Costabile (Sambiase 1924-Rome 1965), Giuseppe Ungaretti, who was tied to him until the end, had written the epitaph, engraved on the tombstone of the cemetery of Sambiase (today Lamezia Terme) who welcomes Costabile as «a rose in the glass», an iconic image of the verses with which Calabria «rested in his heart» («An orange/your heart/, juice of dawn/. Calabria/ rose in the glass», from The rose in the glass).
It almost seems as if they come from an Elsewhere, whether celestial, alchemical, or unconscious, the beautiful verses collected in «La rosa nel vetro», an anthology of all of Costabile’s poems published for the centenary of the birth of the poet and man of letters byCalabrese publisher Rubbettino, who is responsible for the praiseworthy and constant editorial project of valorization and diffusion of the works of many Calabrese writers and poets of the twentieth centuryotherwise forgotten or neglected (for centuries the frivolous have killed poets, wrote Angelo Maria Ripellino).
We need poets, the watchful conscience of humanity and investment in hope, a clear source, even when it seems that the poet has no more epiphanies to give us, and precisely when the continuous emergency and complexity of the world, the absence and indifference pose new frightening challenges that concern us all. The wave of time does not overwhelm Poetry, on the spindle of time the thread of Poetry always rewinds in an eternal return that is independent of literary affiliations and historical categories: like the verses of Costabile that Rubbettino’s anthology brings back to us alive and vibrant, with the precious introduction by Aldo Nove and, edited by Giovanni Mazzei, the illuminating biographical notes and the section of the “Dispersed Poems” (a series of compositions never included in collections but appeared in literary magazines and periodicals contemporary to him).
He used the verse as a necessity (the poetry that attaches itself to the existence of the poet as a body), Costabile, who – Nove reminds us – represents together with Lorenzo Calogero «the highest peaks of Calabrese poetry of the past century»: both «masters so distant and so close», makers of verses for whom, to find the auroral source of their poetry, the meaning of their askesis, of their inexhaustible research, it is necessary to return to those places of the geography «of abandonments and returns», as the Calabrese anthropologist Vito Teti calls them.
Poetry itself is a condition of exile in which to experience the arcane dimension of the mystery of existence, the elsewhere in which the poet’s consciousness is nourished, who in that liminal threshold between dream and everyday life lingers to shelter himself from the landslides of life. And, like a miracle, from that elsewhere the verses function as an antidote-balm to the pain of living.
Therefore, Costabile felt poetry as an existential condition, and he experienced abandonment as a category ever since his father Michelangelo, a few months after the wedding and even before the birth of the future poet – as Mazzei notes – left Calabria and his family to emigrate to Africa, from which he would never return.
Perhaps because of his frayed soul, Costabile looked to his master-fathers: first as a student at the classical high school “Fiorentino” in Nicastro he became attached to the teacher and philosopher Oreste Borrello. Then, after a brief university period in Messina, in Rome, where, having graduated in Literature at the Sapienza, with a thesis in paleography, between the 40s and 50s «he entered a circle of young intellectuals who with their artistic ferment would contribute to an authentic and profound cultural renewal of the Capital and the Country» (so Mazzei): Bassani, Accrocca, Citati, Pasolini, Saviane, Enotrio Pugliese and, above all, Ungaretti, of whom he was a student and who always remained for him a master of life and poetry.
A poet was born and his first collection of 1950, «Via degli Ulivi», confirmed it, appreciated, among others, by Vittorio Sereni, Giorgio Caproni, Raffaello Brignetti (with whom Costabile had an intense friendship). And his poetry grew, rooted in philosophical reflection on the very meaning of man, between wonders and epiphanies «in the sleep of the olive trees», and in the meditatio mortis that is part of nature, a model of beauty and morality, an Eden lost «in the anonymous spaces of the city» where the poet found «nothing more of the lost years», nor «of the childhood of perfumes».
And if «Via degli Ulivi» already contained a declaration of poetics, with the lyrical self dilated to become a participant in the absence, the lack, the loss that man is sick of, among rubble and abandonment, with «La rosa nel vetro» (1961) «the summit and breaking point of a very high poetry, a severe masterpiece» – writes Aldo Nove – , the laceration of the verb, divided between the mythical past of Calabria and the urgency of contemporaneity, coagulates, between jolts and suspensions (with the frequent use of the nominal style), on the burning issues of reality.
Penetrating the shadows of exiles and migrations became a Pasolinian denunciation of homologation; while the poet was still living a complicated family story, the word dug to the essential to bring out arcane voices and mysterious movements, restlessness and furies: an ego in revolt even with itself that recorded between dazzling epigrammatism and bold synaesthetic juxtapositions, how «grapes and dawn» had «become merchandise».
But sudden lyrical outbursts of hendecasyllables, like the splendid «A sparrow chirps in Calabrese» are not enough to sweeten the bitterness in the face of the lost Eden: his South, victim of the «scam of the Unification of Italy», the nightmare story (as he recites in anti-epic form in «1861» and with a Greek chorus cadence in «Canto» and «Cammina con Dio»), the elections of the day with «the honourable who returns to Calabria», the disillusionment of an «infamous Calabria» and the enamoured gaze of someone who nevertheless does not despair: «Here, / you and I, South / must talk to each other once, truly reason calmly, alone / without telling each other fantasies / about our regions. / We must make up our minds / with this heart that is too much of a storyteller» (Apologue from “We must decide”).
Poetry as an effective and affective home, words that become stele and obelisk to be engraved for future memory, before the tragic conclusion of his life. “Costabile, great poet of Europe”, writes Aldo Nove.