The Wall Did Not Answer---Alfonso Gatto's Selected Poems are a Marvel to visit.
This review could easily turn into a wiki-biographical-critical history of the Italian Resistance Poet, but it isn't, mostly because I'm going to assume that dear reader, you, probably have no idea who Gatto is, or even care less about Italian Resistance Poetry. Not that you aren't interested, or turned off by the idea, but that it is this reader's opinion that taking his work out of context is just as powerful of a experience as reading them in context, and it is in fact a testament to his powers to read them out of context and find yourself moved.
And for those of you who like to travel and tramp comfortably about the world, Gatto's poems put you spiritually in the heart of Italy, and emotionally at the center of love. Who wouldn't turn down a romantic night, blossoming with love, wine, and the moon round and plump? Even with danger lurking in the alley, or perhaps even because of it.
I dither on.
Gatto's a good listen, a good read. His works are windows into another relationship, landscape, point of view. Without irony, without bloated symbolism; they are country cottages in a yard of flowers and trees. They may be quiet places to rest your reading hat upon, but they are places full of story, history, and love. What I like to discover in poems are places. Perhaps that's why I like old country songs, and on occasion, a new ramble along about some place I've never been. And because I'm an American and find Mediterranean life romantic when Gatto takes us to where “the evenings shall return to cool off/the piazzas in the blue” and where “O, windows, wells, lodges, glass/attached to life...turn toward dawn with that song of lost words...You are the red pulp of a split watermelon/in the center of a white tablecloth” I'm there. Book my ticket. Sell me on love.
But Gatto is a Resistance poet, a voice against Fascism, and witness and advocate for those who cannot speak. I'm reminded of Martin Espada, my first poetry teacher, who urged his young chargers to not forgot those without a voice, and I imagine Gatto would agree. “It was dawn, and where people worked...where the same shriek/of trams was the day's greeting to the fresh/face of the living—and they wanted a massacre/so that Milan would have...her promised sons all mingled in one heart.” For the Martyrs of Piazzale Loreto juxtaposes the mundane city life with the horror of massacred civilians who were killed for their partisan associations, a subject of great importance in Gatto's mythology.
Gatto's poems begin with place and spiral to people, often to freedom, often to love, which is where all poets eventually return to, is it not?
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