Muzica sferelor

Poetry, Otherwise

You love poems written by others to the extent that you could have written them yourself. I also believe that you can know yourself through others and know others through what you are. It depends on the awareness of your self, like a word spoken in the world, that can create an echo. When I first read Laura Garavaglia’s poems, I had the impression that I recognized myself in them. Poems about people and nature, about peace and war, about love and words, which I would have liked, in a certain context, to write myself.

…death, souls insensitive to poetry, to beauty, to goodness. The soul thinks and the brain feels. The soul becomes palpable and, sometimes, fills with sores. As in Arghezi, who stated: “My soul is sick with scabies.” And then words come, arranged in a line of poetry, to treat. To purify. To make a person better, more beautiful, more generous.

The poet addresses an interlocutor, who is another version of herself—a confidante, witness, or reader. In Laura Garavaglia’s poetry, the sea battles the waves, silence battles words.

In Laura Garavaglia’s poetry, the sea battles the waves, silence battles words, and questions battle answers. She rejects metaphor, as a deviation from natural discourse.

For the poet, memories (memory) are fictions that protect her secret.

Nature is the setting where the spectacle of being unfolds, where man seeks “the formula of beauty.”

To write poetry, this rejuvenator of the poem suggests, does not mean to simply arrange words differently, but to live differently what you want to say with the help of the same words that you use daily at the market, on the street, in public transport.

Otherwise is the business card of this poet, one of the most important in Italy today. Words, Laura Garavaglia implies, can help you, but they will never be able to speak in place of your feelings, experiences, or worries. Because poetry is in us, in each one of us, poets and readers. If you do not have poetry in your heart, do not look for it outside of it, for you might never find it.

Nicolae Dabija