The poetry of Riccardo Bravi, a young intellectual from the Marches at his first lyric rehearsal, is nourished by multiple suggestions, particularly from the French tradition, of which he is a refined lover. Poems of solitude and revolt is a collection – two-faced from the thematic point of view, as the title announces – whose long and exhausted verses presuppose an intricate game of intertextual references, skillfully woven according to a rhyming plot (internal rhymes and, more often, kissed) somewhat innovative.
The synonymous Camusian dictology stands out in the thematic spectrum of the book :olidire and solitaire, the supportive and the solitary, a perfect adjective to describe the lyrical ego that wishes to fight its own solitude (literal and allegorical) with the weapon of revolt: “In the motto Camus “solidire” and “solitaire” hides a double reverberation; / an oxymoron, poetry experts would say, which places côte à côte two antithetical terms. / “Solidarity” and “solitary” actually go hand in hand in the moment in which the creation / takes the forms of an act that addresses the Other ». Ça va sans dire, that of Bravi is a non-fiction poem, centered precisely on the transalpine lesson of the twentieth century, that is, on the aphoristic stroke à la Char or on the claudelian chanting speech, on the philosophical distillation of a Valéry or on the prose-descriptive diction of a Jaccottet .
As Umberto Piersanti rightly observes in the preface, “the numerous literary references are often marked by the search for an identity of destiny, to some fraternity that goes beyond writing itself”.
Proust, Borges e Moravia
This is the case of one of the most successful texts, Sometimes I dream of being sick, in which even three illustrious companions of fate gather: “Sometimes I dream of being sick / so that I can have access to what Borges called the” universal library ” ; / and also Proust, in Time Regained, / wrote that the imagination moves more within a ruined body; / so that I could invent more than when I am healthy, as did Alberto Moravia, / during his more clouded over “.
The “destining” commonality that Bravi claims is of an ontological-existential nature: illness as a pharmakon against the inertness of reality, as a way of accessing a more authentic creative hub, aimed at eluding the “brother-burden”, the heavy chains poetry thus becomes a diary page, a suffocating crunch of references, bittersweet reflection, the need for an aesthetic formula from which to draw admonition for oneself and for others with an almost capronian rhythm (“The mask, as in comedy, it is the indissoluble sign of the broken person / who only steals the song through his eyes “). Angelo Vannini writes very well in the afterword: «Solitude in this collection is temporally complex: it concerns both the individual, confined to his prison, as much as the intersubjective space, the solitude that is situated between individuals; it concerns both the present – the loneliness of the now, as an empirical fact – as much as the future, a loneliness as the absence of a horizon, suspension and closure of possibilities “.