The Strega Poetry Prize announces its second edition

The Strega Poetry Prize has announced the list of books proposed for the second edition. One hundred and forty-four titles will compete: one hundred and thirty-four proposed by the publishers plus ten requested by the Scientific Committee, which will indicate the coveted dozen on Friday 5 April. Among the candidates: Pane del bosco (Einaudi, 2023) by Chandra Livia Candiani, Natura (Stampa2009, 2023) by Roberto Cescon, Paradiso (Garzanti, 2024) by Stefano Dal Bianco, Corpi soluble (Samuele Editore – Pordenonelegge, 2023) by Mario De Santis, Alveare (Crocetti, 2023) by Elisa Ruotolo.

“The word that fulfills you”

It is a collection that is formed by falling like a Carnic stalactite, the latest by Roberto Cescon, Natura (Stampa2009, 2023, pp. 108, euro 14), geologically beyond the human, questioning the diachronic relationship between the individual and the planet Earth. The poet rediscovers his own biological heritage, the set of characters that escape the conscious as well as the dreamlike dimension, and constitute the body’s tissues through sediments, marking ancestral needs and limits that have freed themselves from time and which call into question the definition same as I, an “I that is born only once / when it moves matter / beyond its present”.

Cescon portrays the distance between the personality and the so-called “impersonal”, overturning the perceptive paradigm: the individual sometimes perceives as alien the already native features that he does not recognise, or even ignores due to the epistemological claim to dominate the meanings of acquired reality mentally. On the other hand, as Moro says in The Secret of Pietramala (2018), a person’s psychophysical growth inextricably links the development of long-term memory to linguistic ability: “I deleted two verses, no one will see them / and soon also I will forget them / or maybe they will go back to ruminating / until I find a way to find them”.

Native language

If the momentum lies in Sereni’s realist approach, in the human tools that only touch on the thing said, the semantic substance of the language becomes the zero degree of his stylistic research, since the word remains an imperfect tool for approaching the other. A tool capable of making relationships come true or of nullifying them – between a misunderstanding and a connective – lacking in the communicative and social function.

Cescon demonstrates this through the parataxis of the lyrics, in the manner of Mario Benedetti; with an advancing stumble the verses lengthen and narrow in a continuous “silent flow”.