“For us, there is no dialogue with death,” wrote Milo De Angelis.” There is only a cry. Death refuses to inhabit it. There is only this cry: a cry for help, of anger, of indignation, of amazement.” The theme of the farewell is the representation of the silence of a cry, which encompasses many things, above all loneliness, pain, and silence. A collection of verses that doesn’t lend itself to a quick read, but has the ability to delicately insinuate itself into everyday life and demand a listening ear.
The common thread that links one poem to the next is immediately apparent from the title, where the word “theme” evokes a series of figures, different declinations of the same pain. It brings to mind the subject of a book or a film, the point around which a discourse is structured, a class theme, a melodic phrase in music, even the sky, with its astral themes. In linguistics, however, the theme represents the root, that invariable part of the word to which the endings are added. For me, reading De Angelis was like this: feeling tied to a single root—it seems obvious to say, that of loss, in its most naked and definitive form—to which, page after page, gradually join different inflections, where farewell unfolds, each time seeking its own form, each time changing, each time beautiful.
Writing about loss is never easy, and the author himself confesses why in one of his poems: “the path of grief has no rules, ever.”
De Angelis, however, does not construct a classical elegy, nor a strictly autobiographical lament: he composes a geography of grief, made of empty rooms, stations, courtyards and benches, dialogues in mid-air, you and me, then you and me, blurred memories that return to the shadows like backlit figures, precious moments. Because the death of a person, a creature, or a loved one necessarily changes our view of the world. And then those same rooms, stations, courtyards, benches, conversations, you and me, you and me, me and me alone, memories, shadows, lights, change. The theme of farewell is the book of that orphaned gaze, which painfully describes how things appear when there are no longer two of you, and everything changes, because everything is deprived of a gaze. And then moments become protagonists of every page: “all the steps in front of the door, the glances at the intercom, all the voices, the accents, the syllables, you who came out smiling with your fur hat and walked resolutely toward a bus.”
Certain lines sometimes become cruel, weapons to hold on for a moment longer to what is no longer there, and can never be again. Other lines, however, remain suspended, unresolved, as if words could only touch on what by definition is unrepresentable. Yet, precisely in the space between the cruelty of absence and the suspension of presence, the possibility of a dialogue with our very personal experience of loss opens up, whatever it may be, whatever form we choose to give it. The author confesses in his preface: “Only the Other can speak to death. It is not given to us.” But if we listen to the title of the collection, the word “theme,” etymologically derived from Greek, means “that which is placed,” suggesting the idea of something placed at the center. In this case, for me, something between the space before and the space after, something nameless, a powerful scream that destroys any fear of facing it. It gives us the possibility of imagining that, perhaps, sooner or later, a dialogue could exist.
Written by Maria De Gennaro
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Milo De Angelis, Tema dell’addio, Mondadori, Milano, 2005