Critical essays

A geometry of wise balances

“… In poetry that can be considered as a geometry of wise balances and compositions of the double, because even the poetry of Corbo is not unique but double, or at least complex and non-linear.
It’s just that one of the lines emerges clear, dominant, overbearing, while the other is simpler, or almost hidden underground.
The first one, for example, is the intimate lyrical, retreated on itself … but always reserved and discreet, never rhetoric, never sentimental in a banal way, never an improper confession.
But a closer look, an anatomical investigation that penetrates the bowels, a psychoanalytic sound that touches the deep … reveal a second line that, first hidden by the artifices of poetry, finally discloses…
It is, instead, a line projected outwards, toward the world, toward the others, that is toward the history, achieving the traces of a real solidarity towards the common suffering, towards the dramas of modern life.
Sometimes they are only sudden hints, so unexpected to be caught by, and yet radically changing the original intimate-lyrical direction of a poem … ”

Riccardo Merolla
Professor of Italian Literature
University “La Sapienza” in Rom

Il brano è tratto dalla presentazione della raccolta di poesie di Antonio Corbo, Il cancello di faggi, Ragusa, Cultura Duemila Editrice, 1992.
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