Alessandro Anil has an epic breath that I believe is unique in the Italian poetry of our time, a broad, majestic breath, which embraces an entire tradition and an entire universe. Nature, peoples, epochs and generations converge in these verses and fill them with time. They bring them back into the power of the Vedic hymns and then propel them forward into the mysterious future that prompts the poet to throw the dice of his prophecy. Reading them we feel transported between millennia and between continents. It is a flight that shows us the scene from above, a total look. But at the same time - here is the spell of this poem - it is a flight that knows how to descend suddenly on the detail, it knows how to focus on the single creature and its unrepeatable experience, on the female "you" of a loving conversation, second person singular, very concrete and present, of a woman to whom these words are addressed. The result is a contrasting set of tones and looks. On the one hand there is the questioning of the sage who walks the shores of the absolute, with his immense questions about the meaning of life, of exile, of return. On the other, there is a sermo cotidianus rich in intimacy, the encounter with a faithful friend where the poet recounts episodes and discoveries of his life and translates the boundless forces of the cosmos into the alphabet of the infinitely small. And I underline this verb in italics because it is a crucial point in Anil's work, who has always seen in the poet the translator from a previous arcane language to a language that will be a future language through us, the language of a new community. The translator is therefore the ferryman from one side of being to the other and this translation has a very high stake. From its success - writes Alessandro Anil - depends the highest aspiration of the human being: to join in a single journey the earthly journey to the absolute journey, the microcosm of daily action to the universe of immeasurable distances. It is no coincidence that the metaphor that runs throughout the poem is that of water. Water from rivers but also water from our morning thirst, water that we drink from the glass. Ocean water pouring into sink water and preparing to wash our bodies or boil our daily food. Water that we see flowing from the stream to our eyes and to our tears. “Watching the stream flow until it flows with the stream”, writes Anil: hearing the remote alliance between one side of the river and the other, a whisper of unknown and friendly voices that await us somewhere in the world or within ourselves.

we are on the side of a river and are barely noticeable by the small lights

the vague shapes of the other side. In between, all the uncertain water

which descends in large blocks, its chanting, melodic and constant.

It is here, on this shore, where you lose your strength and indulge yourself     _cc781905-5cde-3194-bb3b-136bad5cf5890d_ 3194-bb3b-136bad5cf5890d_ 3194-bb3b-136bad5cf589094 _cc7 -136bad5cf58d_ 

to the eternal stasis on the threshold, exactly here, not elsewhere, which occurs

over the centuries the beautiful and unexpected help of friendly voices,

these will be the masters, the teachers, the companions of our crossing.

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Notes on the melody of water, from which the following verses are taken, is the third and final movement of a short poem in progress which will be entitled The water of our thirst. The voice that speaks, and can say "I", is that of a young man, one like many others, "the most deadly of beings" (a formulaic expression that marks all the first six lines of the text), at the moment in which the night it gives way at the first light of dawn, «when the eternal contest between light and shadow / renews the daily return of the death called sleep» (I, 43-5). Next to him a girl, whose breath and the heat of her flesh we can feel. Outside, the usual things that return, re-emerge from the warm and indistinct density of the night: and they are sounds, noises, silences, rustles, thoughts that clutter "the air of the room". Because awakening is nothing more than «contradiction, affirmations of the world that begin to knock / at the doors of sleep» (IV, 15-16). And the eternal words of life, the arcane forces of time, the vast imaginations that burn in our souls, and confuse us.

We then understand how everything can expand in this suspended threshold of being, which is like a vast river from which we drink our original thirst for life. And within the voice of this young man also pass the vast emblems of the history of the world. Fragments that would like to capture the eternal, images of the absolute, slivers of an unresolved life: the Hampstead garden where Keats composed his Ode to a Nightingale, the banks of the Ganges that the boy flies over in the form of a hawk, a canvas by Piero della Francesca, Empedocles' sandals, Baudelaire's thoughts on beauty. And "everything is already memory that descends, a mixture of the dead with the living" (VII, 22). Nor will the reader be able to miss the breadth of the images that unroll along these sequences, as in the lines that conclude the third line of the poem: «Dark and brutal centuries have descended along the white and warm ribbons / that recede from your back, between the age of iron and that of nothing / in which we find ourselves among the living". Or again, shortly after, at the beginning of the fourth lassa: «The pollen gathers in the corners of the terrace, but we don't know about the nocturnes / and about the wind that transports and fertilizes, about the hourglass under which the hands flow».

To restore the feeling of this vastness - which is spatial and temporal at the same time - Anil relies on a long, broad and thoughtful verse, which can recall the course of an oriental river, with its slow and lazy flow, its waters which reflect the clarity of the skies or the dark green of the bushes, the long sinuous coils in which it is wrapped: it is a verse that goes beyond traditional rhythm and metric, and which is also never prosaic, and actually seems like a sort of hexameter Reinforced. Even if there is no shortage of sentences, more vertical moments, which suddenly break the narrative movement, as if they wanted to reveal its meaning: «Sleep is oblivion, a return / towards the origin» (II, 1-2); «Time is difference, sleep is the absence of time» (II, 7).

It is striking that a poet who lived until the age of sixteen in India was responsible for the use of a non-asyntactic language, and who actually relies on a uniform and compact plot of subordinate structures, accompanied by the continuous use of metaphors ("the dome of sleep", already in v. 2) or of images of intense figurative force. Just as the state of apparent innocence with which the author can speak, starting from Keats's nightingale, of the "eternal nightingale of Shakespeare, Milton / of Ovid, the one who centuries ago accompanied Ruth to the fields of Israel, / the form of all nightingales" (II, 11-13). It is as if Anil returned again to the origins of a thought and a civilization, making him that imaginative dimension that Leopardi already wanted to aim for in Canti di lui: but with a long and poetic breath that has not been felt in our poetry for some time. And it certainly will not be a coincidence that behind him there is "a long generation of men who between West and East / have tirelessly pulled the threads of this eternal tale" (III, 18-19).

«One might think» writes Rilke in a letter to Clara Westhoff dated 8 October 1907, observing the variations of the sky present in Cézanne's painting «that someone was writing a monograph of blue» ._ cc781905-5cde-3194-bb3b-136bad5cf58d_

The three poems I have chosen are taken from an unpublished poem by Alessandro Anil entitled The water of our thirst. In these texts, the metaphor of water as the incessant flow of the uncreated nature of Being is accompanied by an intimate dialogue with a female referent, the cosmicity of poetic words walks on the parallel track of the daily dimension of life. The continuous references to small things chase the big ones and are cloaked in progressive meanings while the dictation, starting from a simple casus, from a microcosmic element of observation, from the focus of an object, of a look, of a gesture, is always made more universal as the hypermeter overflows in the direction of a rebus conversation with the self and with the other from the self. It almost seems that Anil wants to go back to the primitive root of philosophical speech, which, far from being an incomprehensible and abstruse dissertation that searches without success the hidden conceptual substance of logical structures, instead appears, in the quiet flow of his poetic discourse, as a sort of dialogue of the minimum systems that decipher the highest aesthetic heights of the World or, better said, as a delicate anamnesis of the mystery inherent in the continuous transformation of time and occasions, in an all-encompassing catharsis that leads the reader to the superhuman feeling of metexis.

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