Massimo Gezzi

Il numero dei vivi

«From a gate ajar everyone sees / their own stories in the form / of irrigation ditches, fields of rapeseed, / profiles strutting against the changing / colours of sunrises.»

Six years after his collection «L’attimo dopo», Massimo Gezzi, with «The Living», has reached a new stage in his poetic journey. If, in his previous work, the influence of certain poets was evident - Eugenio Montale and Vittorio Sereni, for example, as well as Fabio Pusterla – in «The Living», such influences are less pronounced, and Gezzi comes fully into his own with poems that tend progressively towards prose.
The title reveals a need: to start counting again, to enumerate the topics and things which, in the previous book, focused on the theme of time; which were so precarious and ephemeral as to prove tragically elusive. «The Living» instead suggests a different ethical position and a new necessity: one that is born of being part of a community that is local (a house, a classroom, a city), but also planetary, that finds itself in an uncertain and violent time, and tries, sometimes without hope, to resist or oppose it. It is a book about the living and about their existence, deeply flawed, yet full of dignity.
In «Alias», the weekly literary feature ofIl Manifesto, the literary critic Massimo Raffaeli writes of this new collection of poems by Gezzi: «‹The Living› testifies not only to a further deepening of his exploration but, in particular, it reveals the author’s true character. The lessons of the masters and of his poetic peers have been absorbed and processed into a style that progressively tends towards prose [...], while the themes that in the past were linked to a historical or generational situation here are developed according to a pattern that is essentially existential: the uncertain and ambiguous light of everyday life; the privilege and the burden of fatherhood; the Socratic enigma of those who, in order to make a living, must teach every day, and must therefore take upon themselves the experiences of younger individuals, who are even more vulnerable and helpless.»

Recommended for translation by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia: www.12swissbooks.ch

Translation of title: The Living

Donzelli Editore, Roma 2015

ISBN: 978-8-86843-186-0