Poemas 2012 – 2024

In questa antologia si invita il lettore a intraprendere un viaggio affascinante e intimo, unendo le due anime, apparentemente distanti, della scienza e della poesia. Come un filo conduttore, l’immaginazione scientifica permea gran parte dei versi, intrecciandosi con le più profonde emozioni e riflessioni. Le poesie, pur nella loro varietà di temi e toni, sono legate da un unico respiro: la ricerca di un senso più profondo dell’esistenza, un tentativo di comprendere l’universo e il nostro posto in esso. Attraverso metafore appartenenti al linguaggio scientifico e immagini evocative, ripercorrendo le vite di alcuni illustri matematici, l’autrice ha cercato di esplorare le profondità dell’animo umano e stimolare il lettore a riflettere sulle grandi domande che da sempre affascinano l’umanità.

“Poetry is a thing as precise as geometry,” said Gustave Flaubert in a famous letter to Louise Colet (1853): as if to say that the difference between intuition and deduction, between metaphor and metonymy, lyricism and rationality, is only apparent, thus placing them on the same level.

This statement, if not applicable to others, particularly suits Laura Garavaglia and finds confirmation in the conviction she demonstrates, which gives her writing a lyrical soul, in a balance between emotion and exactness of language, avoiding all vagueness and certain prevailing Lacanianisms.

All of this is accompanied by her enthusiastic practice as a cultural promoter, which has important international recognition. (…) Her poetry is one of great questions: a poetry that, in “different languages” (after French, now also in Spanish, Poemas (2012-2024), translated by Emilio Coco and Giovanni Darconza, in the Pigmalión Edition of Madrid, 2025) but with a fixed and common denominator—namely, fidelity to a precise poetic and conceptual system—projects beyond the contingent to address the Great Questions: the “Absolute,” the number, understood as an experience of the spirit, transcendent (“a staircase towards the sky”), which in its most complete form pertains to mysticism, to God, the “Absolutely Infinite,” beyond any arid arithmetic of the continuous and of Time.

It is for this reason that her poetry is transformed and is truly a “step towards the infinite,” which, with the ambition of “capturing the infinite in an instant,” becomes a true mystical experience, to transcend the presence of things and reach their essence, that which lies beyond their silence. In short, it becomes a space for the unspeakable, to give voice to that “Absolutely Infinite” spoken of by a great mathematician, Georg Cantor, the father of set theory.

It is precisely along this line that the poetess Laura Garavaglia is moving with increasing conviction, carving out a peculiar space for herself in contemporary Italian poetry, starting especially with the collection Numeri e Stelle (2015), hoping, in an exact and concentrated language of polished brilliance, for its recognition as a greatness and an endpoint of the mind, beyond the contingent and “mediocrity,” heedless of all indeterminacy and potentiality.