Chiudo la porta e urlo
Raffaello Baldini is a great poet and yet very few people know who he is, and of those very few have recognized his voice. Is that beacause he writes in the beautiful dialect of Sant'Arcangelo di Romagna? But no. Paolo Nori reminds us that he is a huge poet even in the beautiful Italian with which the poet has always translated his verses at the foot of the page. And how many stories those verses drag along, how many images they elicit, how many characters, how much universe there is in that seemingly small world. As is his wont, Paolo Nori traverses Baldini's poetic adventure almost as if there were nothing else around, of himself making the filter of a beauty that comes up as if from a fountain and is frightening because it leaves us estranged. Here it is that-not unlike what happened with Dostoevskji and Achmatova-Baldini's imagination melts inside Nori's, made as it is of characters and seemingly minimal happenings: the dead who “say nothing and know everything,” the men who instead of dropping their years grow them, the standing there of a woman in front of the ring road to watch “the world go by.” Between thrusts and counterthrusts, between the “let's begin as well” and “let's continue as well” that recur to beat the rhythm, we learn that, more and more, Nori's writing is the progressive focusing of a character, his own: his being “asshole,” his being “bastiancontrary,” his being “mad as a Russian,” his being in love with a poet like Raffaello Baldini, his magisterial standing in front of the Nori's house as if it were a button box, his standing to see life as it goes on with each unforeseen unfolding of being in the world.