A Nobel Prize to an old poet comforts us and challenges those who no longer believe in the noble art.
We still need and want poems, which is why the author of this collection wrote them, because of a need and want. She writes to express the pain of the absence of a father never met, in a dialogue from afar with a father who had left before making himself known to her. And of the relationship with her mother, the expression of a filial and at once maternal love; the daughter needed her mother and now the mother needs her daughter’s reciprocated love.
In the text we find poems for loves dreamed, recalled places, and past memories to hold onto against oblivion. A long and convoluted path where some get lost in order to find their way back, looking for someone or something that can fill the void of an existence surrounded by a vexing loneliness, gladly and without fear.
There is some sort of complacency in the pain of a lost happiness for which there is a contradictory and unappeased thirst. Surrounded by ghosts haunting our lives, poems allow us to lose ourselves in search of something indefinite.
In her verses, the author expresses the illusion, well lived, of an oneiric life escaping banal reality. It is a soul that awakens in the writing, bringing to light intimate passions, waking dreams; it is the confirmation that the best way to escape the ordinary is poetry steeped in nostalgia, helpful over time to recover moments of joy and happiness. As Cardarelli wrote, “Happiness, I recognised you from your gait when you walked away”.
With her poems, the author thanks the life that has given her so much, as did Violeta Parra: “Thanks to the life that has given me so much. It has given me laughter and it has given me tears. Thus I distinguish joy from brokenness.”
And if the boat of destiny has run aground, we are not the masters of our fate. As an Ethiopian proverb says, “You can wake up very early at dawn, but your destiny is awake half an hour before you.”
Despite everything, however, we have to write and read poems like those of our author because, as the great Spanish writer Azorín used to say, “What is important is not the reality but the dream we dream.”
Mario Azzolini
Virna Chessari graduated from Palermo University in Classical Literature,studying Latin and Greek. She is an Italian and History teacher at a high school in Palermo, where she is in charge of communication and projects of innovative teaching like Avanguardie Educative-Indire. She is also a CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) teacher. She has been published in newspapers, magazines and cultural websites. Poetry in particular is a recent adventure for her. Some of the poems in the collection have been published in Straylight Magazine and Blue Lake Review. She has found in English the right notes to express her inner world and her missing words.
Virna Chessari, docente di Lettere Classiche e CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) insegna Italiano e Storia in una scuola secondaria di Palermo dove è referente della comunicazione e di progetti di didattica innovativa come Avanguardie Educative-Indire. Suoi contributi sono stati pubblicati in giornali, riviste, siti e blog di divulgazione culturale. La Poesia, in particolare, è una recente avventura. Alcune poesie della raccolta sono state pubblicate nelle riviste americane “Straylight Magazine” e “Blue Lake Review”. L’autrice ha trovato nell’Inglese la melodia per dare voce al suo mondo interiore, alle parole mancanti.
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