Il profumo del giglio
I have always liked the works of Elisa Zadi.
But I had only known her as a painter or as a performer in imaginative installations. It was a pleasant surprise to come across one of his poetry collections. Although writing has actually been a part of her all her life. Same source, therefore same sensitivity, but a different form of expression. It is also interesting to discover how similar one modality is to another, how it evokes the contents, in a coherent sense but with different nuances. Elisa's poems have a very important quality. As you scroll down the lines they reveal themselves, blossom, with the incredible sincerity of flowers. They arrive immediately, they communicate. It shows itself clearly. In this manifestation they know how to be delicate but also brutal, like life. In reading them you never have the feeling that there is something studied, artificial, put there because it suited us. They are not an assortment of beautiful and obsolete words unearthed to create fascinating assonances, the meaning of which can ultimately remain nebulous, if not obscure. They are effective, substantial. But this clear accessibility to meaning does not come at the expense of the poetry or the beauty of the text. They are verses that tell the world without too many filters. Not glimpsed behind pink veils or perfumed mists, but free from illusions. Yet in their harshness they can tell us very well that a mysticism exists. Nature has a mystical side. Secular, earthly, even simple to live, say. At the same time vast, infinite, very complex. In Elisa's poems you can feel it, this deep breath. The presence of this comforting mystery is perceived. Just like in his painting. The world for her is not a flower garden. And Nature is neither good nor bad. But it is everywhere. The earth takes back its children and devours them, to create more life. There is pain, sorrow, in the observer. It is not easy to accept the flow of this cycle. Because the observer is also part of it. And he is aware that he will not escape his end, like everything else. But he has to accept it. Even if in the immediate future the bewilderment remains, and must be fought every time. You can't beat it, perhaps. But you can not succumb. Love seems to be the only possible weapon. For everyday things, for the plants in the garden, for the rhythms of the seasons, for what happens to us in this way of life. And for someone. The partner, the lover, the other. Love that is carnal, knowingly voracious. An intimately sought, felt pleasure, a physical but also sentimental pleasure lived to the end, in complete abandonment. Even knowing that everything will then be uncertain. But with the certainty that in any case there can be nothing better, more engaging, more overwhelming, more natural, to feel life. Physically fulfilling love, then. To which follows, with the same regularity with which the quiet autumn follows the red summer, the stasis, the after. An after that seems silent, lost. Which is often, indeed almost always, a disillusionment. And it tastes like funeral, burial. Already foreseen, of course, already taken into account. Partly personal, due to the characteristics of the other, partly intrinsic to the very substance of love. Cycle, this too. Disappointment for that feeling that before it was nice to feel or perhaps imagine present, complete, disruptive and which now reveals itself as something partial, only sketchy, banal. To be abandoned, it was already written, how a wreath of flowers is left to the calm will of the sea. Without anger. Here, anger is never the protagonist in these poems. There is regret, but everything always seems to be part of a flow that is already known and accepted with elementary wisdom. This is how things go. Pleasure can be grasped, indeed it must be grasped and totally savored, but this is then followed by a sort of incompleteness which must also be accepted. At the bottom of the bitterness, however, something else also seems to glimmer, the golden vein of irony. Present, it seems to me, also in the self-portraits of Elisa. Which at first glance appear unequivocally composed in melancholy and astonished expressions. But that if you leave your eyes time to linger a bit and look at them more carefully, the doubt of the possible imminent appearance of something unexpected begins to creep into you. A small smile, with the corner of the mouth, for all that we are, of a bird and a passenger. Here the same thing is felt. Even if it would be useless to look for words that actually offer an invitation to do so, this smile. The irony is hidden away, hidden in the general tone. In the choice of words, in the rhythm of the lines. Which seem to suggest that smiling is implicit, indeed inevitable, of the incomplete and unresolved nature of our existence.
https://zadielisa.blogspot.com/2021/11/il-profumo-del-giglio-raccolta-di.html
