If the function of poetry, as the great poet Adonis said, is to reconnect the link between language and existence, for Mario Falcone, from Messina, writer and screenwriter (he has written successful television dramas) the poetic experience is a new expressive and existential path. Reckless, certainly, like every time the ego is put under the lens of observation within the chiaroscuro of feelings, here “posted” in verse. A chase, the one between the poetic word and Falcone’s writing path, which until now had favored the narrative form, while life itself fled forward, wavered, taking away time and space from him to dwell on making poetry.
And instead here is his first anthology, «Small stones» (La Feluca Edizioni), not a “hortus conclusus” but a reconnaissance with an almost diaristic character to express enchantment and disillusionment, melancholy and dreams, indignation and nostalgia, “small stones” which like traces or destinations mark the road that Falcone travels looking inside of himself and life with loving ruthlessness.
Thus, in the twilight of domestic geometry the writer seems to pause, in an era of the soul, in front of each of its “small stones”, as if close to a threshold to be crossed to open up onto a past that seems like a melancholy carousel ride and a present that is consumed in the effort to save itself from landslides of inauthenticity. Conflicts, disappointments and bitterness, absence as a category that concerns us all, but also memories, emotions and feelings entrusted to an anti-sublime language, deliberately concrete and “subdued”, in the use of speech, with thoughts that grow on themselves they become gusts of melancholic memories, branches of days lived recomposed with the long stride of the prose progression in an apparently “disordered” expressive bouquet.
An oblique handwriting with the word sometimes contracted, sometimes dilated and hypertrophic, no ambiguity between the poetic self and biographical individuality, and the rules of meter broken to say jolts and suspensions, confusion and tremors of dreams. But it is precisely in the labyrinth of the unresolved knots of existence, while time ruthlessly swallows up affections and presences, that the consoling Muse “carries within itself an option of salvation”, as he writes in the preface Marietta Salvo, a celebrated Messina poet of long standing.
In the complex ordinariness of the world, “the siege continues” and in the desert of the Tartars of routine there is a risk of “falling ill with loneliness and waiting”, and yet, if poetry, as Yves Bonnefoy said, is hope in language, everyone the verses sing of hope.