Whoever sets out on the long initiation of poetry may keep to broad, flat highways or choose the rough, inaccessible byways, and advance with measured strides or amble along just as his own discipline or whim dictates. Giacomo Garzya favours the latter gait, and it leads him and us to certain places and certain times.
Right from its title, time appears to be the predominant theme of this third collection of poems, the single idea exercising overwhelming fascination. In the very first poem the poet wishes to be able to penetrate the nature of time, to freely contemplate life itself, while subsequently time becomes the recognition of his roots, enjoyment of the present moment, memory of direct experience and indeed of history.
On the very first reading I felt that in this volume we see the poet exploring himself and his own nature. He does so in full awareness that on this journey he is destined never to encounter again the same time or person as at the beginning. He frequently alludes pacifically and without reticence to the state of solitude. Far from involving laceration and exclusion, this seems to me to be merely a momentary silencing of other voices. It enables him to heed the voice of his own inner being which comes across in a measured and lucid discourse, breaking through his 'hard shell' or 'rough cloth'.
Places which we reach and return from them: this itinerary involves many very different ports of call, both a record of reality and personal experience and an evocation of distant memories, knowledge he had gained. A place recalls past readings, sentiments and unlooked-for sensations. Each vision of a place provokes a sudden surge of emotion: it is as if the reader can sense at first hand the genesis of an idea that turns into a poem.
It comes quite naturally to use photography as a paradigm, for the author is also an accomplished photographer. He has a practised eye for seizing features and colours, details and atmospheres, which are then given distinctive form to communicate a message, and all this is brought into his poetry. Apparently the change of medium does not cause him any difficulty, even though the objective lens is replaced by the more evasive word, and as we know, once the inspiration of the creative moment is past, one almost always has to go back over what has been written.
The geography of this volume is far-flung and traces a comprehensive map of his inner world, memories and passions. It visits varied, contrasting landscape: at first the places of his roots, northern 'moors' with the scent 'of heather', 'thick fogs', 'the deserted plain … scoured by winds'; and then the 'red earth' with 'olives … bent and twisted by the winds off the sea like the gnarled runnels on the hillsides '.
Two natural elements always feature whenever he visits or revisits places, always the same and yet ready to take on different connotations. I am speaking of the sea and wind, surely two Leitmotifs in his poetry, indispensable keys to his poetic code. The 'cold sea … of the Baltic … the magic North', admired in a dream when he was a child and object of nostalgia for the grown man, and then the sea of Greece and our own sea, spread out in front of the city, with our islands lying out there to be admired, 'the water green and blue and limpid', 'the sea - which - comes alight in the sun's full splendour'.
Of course the sea implies water in general, as in lakes that may lie placid, pleasant visions conjuring up the tenderness of loving relationships, or serve as a backdrop, setting the scene in conjunction with the wind for the poet's beloved mountains. There is no contradiction in this dual attraction to such widely differing landscapes: the laboured ascent, the summit, the shafts of light found only at certain altitudes, are perfectly apt to represent the surge of emotion we talked about, the solitude and the journeying.
Water in general also includes a river like the Seine, a sort of ideal boundary line which marks not a limit but, on the contrary, the threshold of a limitless realm of lofty aspirations, like the 'stars … far from the daily violence of events and words '. The poem describing the Banks of the Seine initiates a brief sequence celebrating France - a country imbued with intense personal experiences for the author. Here we find an intensification of his tendency to explore his own feelings, and this proceeds through the rest of the collection. In the preceding collections the emphasis was chiefly on description and representation. Here, and this is perhaps the innovation of this volume, the author is keener to recount himself, and indeed seems to take pleasure in doing so. This produces a greater security in the language, a sounder expressive touch. Here as before we find the same sophisticated approach to word choice, but there is a new depth to the 'spontaneous levity' identified by Giuseppe Galasso (see Introduction) with respect to the previous collection. In fact the latter's title is also the title of the first poem here, indicating continuity but also a new point of departure. Galasso is surely right to recognise in Garzya's output 'unlooked-for and improbable depths '.
Now strictly the time has come to turn to the many topics, meanings and impressions contained in this volume, but this would risk becoming excessively generic and indeed boring. Besides, whenever one analyses poetry, chopping it up into little sections, something is bound to be left out, ignoring some feature that others regard as essential. Or else one fails to identify and render the sense of the whole, which at times is available to the reader not just as explicit significance but as implicit suggestion. Thus I am strongly inclined to proceed with a mere list, leaving the poet's emotions to do their work.
Let me identify two presences, both of them forceful, although the first is extremely recondite, hinted at with timidity: the sense of the divine; while the other arouses passions, being the tenderness of love, exaltation, sadness. We find the idea of the woman forcefully leading the author, not of course to the edge of the abyss but to the swooning consciousness of his most intimate inner self.
Then I can identify music which, part of his fund of knowledge, itself animates a place and a character, or a world which often is no more - I am thinking of Juliette and Saint-Germain-des-Près, Rodriguez and Coimbra (where the poet composes his own fado), and Mascagni's Cavalleria which ends with Turiddu's blood on the flowery parterre of the Cunziria.
I can refer to the delight in loving relationships, which is almost always expressed in a series of colours. There is no doubt that Giacomo Garzya stands outside any literary current or trend, and is free of any influence or inclination to imitate, but this particular aspect sets him close to the work of a well-known poet of our times, namely I. Ritsos, who was also a no less distinguished painter. His reputation as a poet derives almost exclusively from his role as spokesman against all forms of dictatorship in his country. Nonetheless, at the height of his maturity - when the political situation in Greece, and also his personal life, had achieved a certain tranquillity - he experimented with linguistic forms which transcended the confines between poetry and painting, word and image. In this truly revolutionary approach the evocation of colours emerged as the only expressive code which could stand as a commonly recognisable convention.
And finally I can point to the insights the poet derives from history. It is in the last poems of the collection that we see most clearly how Garzya identifies quite profoundly with his personal fund of knowledge. He singles out five significant events during which the modern world found itself at a crossroads, about to take a decisive step in which there would be no going back, and he adopted a specific poetical approach and technique for each one.
In Bouillon, against a backdrop of contrasting landscapes where the West stands in opposition to the East, it is an individual, Goffredo "count and never king", who is the protagonist of a fatal choice. In Otrànto the Moslem horde which invaded the splendid basilica overlooking this town on the coast of Puglia, marring the wonderful marble floor mosaics with their hoofprints and exterminating an incredible number of the inhabitants, evokes age-old reasons for current troubles, although it is the sense of profound emotion which prevails. Whoever has been to Otranto will immediately sense, in the accentuation of the second syllable, a local peculiarity, transmitting all the vitality of the collective memory, for the inhabitants continue to relate to that remote event as if it had just happened. In Napoli 1822 we find atmosphere and a pure description of effects, amidst the explosion of our own volcano and peaceful, familiar images of a seaside jetty.
The two poems 15-18 June 1815 and Praga 1968 share a particularly accomplished compositional device. The battle of Waterloo is reconstructed by means of precise flashbacks, the key moments masterfully singled out, showing a comprehensive grasp of the subject and the ability to visualise history and bring it to life. The same approach and narrative technique is adopted for the streets and squares celebrating the Prague Spring, only to invaded by tanks: personal experience, as we have said, history and narrative combined, the pursuit of a journey towards the most human of outcomes, the mourning of lost liberty, a chapter ended.
These five historical compositions - although of course history was clearly present also before this point - are given in rigorous chronological order (which I have altered for my own aesthetic ends). They bring the volume to a close, opening out from individual experience to the experience of one and all, representing the essential juxtaposition, but also continuity, of Past and present.
Where, we might ask, is the third and final category of time, the future? Of course this, with the abundant productivity it presupposes, is our wish for the author, and our confident expectation from him.

ADRIANA PIGNANI

(Presentation of "Passato e Presente" by Giacomo Garzya, at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, Naples, 30 January 2003)
(traduzione in inglese del compianto amico Mark Weir).