... preface by Dino Ales
Maria Stella Filippini has written the lines contained in this collection on the wave of strong emotions produced by the “Valley of the Painted Stones”an enormous work on specially erected gigantic stones situated in a valley on the outskirts of Campobello di Licata, in the Province of Agrigento.
These emotions are provoked by the paintings, at the same time strong and sanguine, mystic and realistic, produced by Maestro Benedetto who is retracing the imagined events of the Dantean journey (of which he has finished the first book) translating them into dramatic signals, powerfully grafted onto the surrounding territory.
The magic poetic moment is born of colour, then, of Benedetto’s strong and magical figuration, and of meditation on external principles, on time, on history...
It should be said, therefore, that Filippini’s poetry has its own dense figurality which goes beyond this meeting with the Argentinian artist: a figurality that grows out of her relationship with the depths of Sicily, which is as though placed on a ridge separating a sun-drenched world, dense with dazzling lights and colours, from a different world, mournful and dark, sad and lunatic: “is lit up by the moon at full/that glides above the lapidary marguerites” e poi (da tradurre) “in the night, all dark blue steely metal” “Brushstrokes of liquid fire/of ice” and again “In the distance there shimmers a drifting gleam/field by field the stubble burns/the sky bursts into flower” “the stones seem like white eagles/ making the colours dance” “With great wings of swans/the moths will fly up from the fire”. These last two lines of suggestive beauty provide the title for the collection.
Filippini’s free verse, it seems to me, corresponds and adheres perfectly to the very concept of colour wich is often present with considerable strenght throughout the entire poetic itinerary: Physical colour, which is at the same time conceptual, spiritual in its innocence, in the purity of its lyrical language. Free verse, then, to which modern and contemporary poetry have accustomed us, but not without formal rigour: indeed, the combination of freedom and rigour give these poems a quality of cultural tension which is closely tied to the poetic feeling of the present, a present with is not ephemeral, but part of a deep sense of awareness, which compares dramatically with the temporal and the eternal.
This is the poetry of multi-faceted simbolic meaning and this, too, is in harmony with much modern poetry which re-evaluates and reabsorbs, among other things, moments of twentieth-century Symbolism and expresses a need to capture the obscure meaning of the present and the future.
These emotions are provoked by the paintings, at the same time strong and sanguine, mystic and realistic, produced by Maestro Benedetto who is retracing the imagined events of the Dantean journey (of which he has finished the first book) translating them into dramatic signals, powerfully grafted onto the surrounding territory.
The magic poetic moment is born of colour, then, of Benedetto’s strong and magical figuration, and of meditation on external principles, on time, on history...
It should be said, therefore, that Filippini’s poetry has its own dense figurality which goes beyond this meeting with the Argentinian artist: a figurality that grows out of her relationship with the depths of Sicily, which is as though placed on a ridge separating a sun-drenched world, dense with dazzling lights and colours, from a different world, mournful and dark, sad and lunatic: “is lit up by the moon at full/that glides above the lapidary marguerites” e poi (da tradurre) “in the night, all dark blue steely metal” “Brushstrokes of liquid fire/of ice” and again “In the distance there shimmers a drifting gleam/field by field the stubble burns/the sky bursts into flower” “the stones seem like white eagles/ making the colours dance” “With great wings of swans/the moths will fly up from the fire”. These last two lines of suggestive beauty provide the title for the collection.
Filippini’s free verse, it seems to me, corresponds and adheres perfectly to the very concept of colour wich is often present with considerable strenght throughout the entire poetic itinerary: Physical colour, which is at the same time conceptual, spiritual in its innocence, in the purity of its lyrical language. Free verse, then, to which modern and contemporary poetry have accustomed us, but not without formal rigour: indeed, the combination of freedom and rigour give these poems a quality of cultural tension which is closely tied to the poetic feeling of the present, a present with is not ephemeral, but part of a deep sense of awareness, which compares dramatically with the temporal and the eternal.
This is the poetry of multi-faceted simbolic meaning and this, too, is in harmony with much modern poetry which re-evaluates and reabsorbs, among other things, moments of twentieth-century Symbolism and expresses a need to capture the obscure meaning of the present and the future.
The poet in general, and Filippini with a particular feeling of tension, as these verses suggest, attempts to go beyond individual experience in order to consider and poetically decode collective destiny.
There is in these verses, like a sort of contemporary mysticism, a courageous and at the same time painful desire to be part of time and the wordl.
This poetry expresses acceptance of the contemporary, lived with the courage to apply a clear refusal to whatever cannot be shared and is to be condemned.
In one voice with Dante, present-day Hell is condemned: brainwashing, heretics, usurers, the violent, cheats... all the evils of this world.
This poetry by Filippini is conceived, then, to be and not to evade: to affirm her own existence as a poet and, that is, a human person who uses words to narrate her own and other souls and to launch a multiplicity of messages to her contemporaries.
One of the most pressing of these is hope: “we shall leave one day/in search of the lost landing-place/Navigators of crystal/like Ulysses shall follow the route/on the road to the Sun”.
The sun is seen as origin and symbol of light, and has always been the expression of magnificence and divine splendour.
In the past someone noted in Filippini’s poetry the presence of ”a historical, cosmic and existential pessimism” while being, at the same time, “free singing...an hymn to life”.
Today it would seem to me that in her latest output she has practically freed herself of her former pessimism and her verse is now characterised, above and beyond her level of maturity, by a more cognizant use of words, a use which is more suited to navigation not only in the metaphoric spaces of her “Valley”, but in those of dreams and above-all, in the atmosphere and higher dimensions of thought.
What Filippini offers in her new collection is a reconfirmation that poetry, beyond its various possible crises, is always capable of finding and providing new strategies in order to recover its senses, to discover its own new and real contact with the world...with its contemporaries.
Poetry can certainly not be defined if not in “its becoming” and a probable definition comes to mind after reading Maria Stella Filippini Di Caro’s verse: “... what was dreamed in the presence of the Reason”. This was Tommaso Ceva, in the eighteenth century.
There is in these verses, like a sort of contemporary mysticism, a courageous and at the same time painful desire to be part of time and the wordl.
This poetry expresses acceptance of the contemporary, lived with the courage to apply a clear refusal to whatever cannot be shared and is to be condemned.
In one voice with Dante, present-day Hell is condemned: brainwashing, heretics, usurers, the violent, cheats... all the evils of this world.
This poetry by Filippini is conceived, then, to be and not to evade: to affirm her own existence as a poet and, that is, a human person who uses words to narrate her own and other souls and to launch a multiplicity of messages to her contemporaries.
One of the most pressing of these is hope: “we shall leave one day/in search of the lost landing-place/Navigators of crystal/like Ulysses shall follow the route/on the road to the Sun”.
The sun is seen as origin and symbol of light, and has always been the expression of magnificence and divine splendour.
In the past someone noted in Filippini’s poetry the presence of ”a historical, cosmic and existential pessimism” while being, at the same time, “free singing...an hymn to life”.
Today it would seem to me that in her latest output she has practically freed herself of her former pessimism and her verse is now characterised, above and beyond her level of maturity, by a more cognizant use of words, a use which is more suited to navigation not only in the metaphoric spaces of her “Valley”, but in those of dreams and above-all, in the atmosphere and higher dimensions of thought.
What Filippini offers in her new collection is a reconfirmation that poetry, beyond its various possible crises, is always capable of finding and providing new strategies in order to recover its senses, to discover its own new and real contact with the world...with its contemporaries.
Poetry can certainly not be defined if not in “its becoming” and a probable definition comes to mind after reading Maria Stella Filippini Di Caro’s verse: “... what was dreamed in the presence of the Reason”. This was Tommaso Ceva, in the eighteenth century.
