Domenico Segna's acrobatics in verse, between the intimate and the universal

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There are rare poets whose texts stand up against every supposed law of literary gravity . Often they are both oracular and ethereal, pervaded by a ubiquitous and therefore elusive irony, like a kite that flutters here and there, no one knows if it has slipped out of hand, or like a soap bubble materialized by who knows what breath. These poets express a quiet and crazy rationality, punctilious and crooked . They seem like flowers without stems, the fruit of a chemical reaction impossible to reconstruct: they make one think of a non-Euclidean geometry of poetry. This is the case of Domenico Segna , who returns to bookstores today with “Le onde radio” , published by AnimaMundi. The author of the preface Alberto Bertoni correctly speaks of a “meditative and gentle” lyric, mixed with “black humor” and anxiety. It is also a lyric entirely woven with implicit quotations. In Segna’s previous collection we found character-churches or geometric place-churches that defined all the points of a specific fantasy nourished by personal, collective and bookish memories. The names of the cult centers became the amniotic fluid of the poet’s affective biography. With similar procedures and partly with similar references, but with a more intimate torment, the author resumes the discourse here. The result is a crasis between autobiography and universal history, between private traumas and millenary beliefs, organized through a naturally surrealist catalog: “I am bizarre, bizarre gift (…) Unrepentant Jew, Roman Christian, / persuasive Muslim, Christian again / and still Orthodox Jew / doves on the roof just to spite / the next day without me. / Cheap Ephialtes of a mirror / ancien regime, leap year fatwa / of myself to be true / at the department of Thermopylae / I remain the tiredness of a mystery”. “I remain the tiredness of a mystery”: here is an almost Verlainian final verse, which could function as an emblem of civilization for all of us.

Orienting himself only with the thread of the subconscious, the poet advances confidently among chaotic lists, phonic associations that produce unexpected sparks of meaning, assimilations of the micro to the macrocosm, analogies that equalize qualitatively incompatible dimensions, gentle metrical dislocations. All these characteristics, blended together, make the collection similar to an uninterrupted acrobatics: each verse makes us slide towards an unexpected reality. Emmaus, Carthage, the “Evening of a dog on a farm”, the lake of Tiberias, a “Hoopoe of silence” pass before us. The writer says he is translating “the dream of a dogma” or “the dark customs / of a resigned board game”: he is “a visionary employee”, a son abandoned by his father in an indecipherable silence, which he continually fills poetically like Sisyphus. His defense is a decanted Absurd, torn from the heaviness of existence, in which the cruelty of the family story is transformed into a sardonic fairy tale. Obviously this technique has a cost: perhaps that of closing one's love "with its sailing ship in a glass bottle", as it is said in a verse that clearly clarifies the functioning of Segna's imagination.

Usually, sacred history and profane history crowd together in the same painting. In “Dopocena”, for example, the end of the “last” supper of Jesus is represented, who, having said goodbye to his friends, floats in an eventless silence between Downton Abbey and the dishwasher, while in a double allusion to Ensor and the EU the “Icons of yesterday’s radio waves / tell of his entry into Brussels”. Segna is a frontier Catholic, psychologically Protestant, who with his Jewish side exorcises the dissolution of a rigorously delimited religious space. In his world the Holy Spirit, here and there in the form of a radio wave, touches all the figures of all imaginaries, reunited in an eternal co-presence that has a known earthly symbol: that Rome where the author grew up. The Rome of Gramscian communists, of non-Catholic cemeteries, of basilicas. A city that always asks us the same question: is everything sacred, or is everything surrealist?

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