Periferie / The Bliss of Hush and Wires
Ilaria Boffa

Samuele Editore 2016, collana Scilla
preface by Simona Wright
cover by Rachel Slade

pag. 128
Isbn. 978-88-96526-73-6

With her second poetry collection, Periferie / The Bliss of Hush and Wires, Ilaria Boffa continues to affirm her strong and sensitive poetic voice. Already in her first collection, Spaces, Boffa had focused on space as guiding principle of her poetic world. With its myriad events, life offers us a multiplicity of experiences, all containing an epistemological dimension. The opposition of Hush and Wires, as proposed in the title, serves as entryway into the sphere of the poetic, where what appears contrastive, incompatible, intersects, producing a sensation of awe. Thus in the verses poetry meets technical progress, verticality meets horizontal lines, heaven intersects with earth, myth with modernity. Privileging the spatial element, the poet embraces a sensitivity that is complex and stratified that allows her to work and experiment with the sensations, impressions, and emotions these intersections provide. Peripheries allow the gaze to observe reality from the margins, to recognize its multiple refractions, and to enter the liminal space of contamination. It is a spatial condition from which events, memories, and feelings acquire a special meaning, where the imperceptible is revealed, opening up to original analogies and interpretations. Peripheries and margins are not exclusively spatial, they are rather opportunites to explore beyond the visible, revealing to the lyrical subjectivity the hidden and mysterious sides of reality. The search is both thematic and stylistic, as images change perceptions, intensifying meaning and resulting in a expression that is delicate, full of lightness, and yet persistent.

Simona Wright

 
 
 
 
 
 
Underneath the Sycamore Tree
 
 
I.
 
Underneath the Sycamore tree, intruders rest their shadows.
Peculiar hats, long tousled hair, pale skin, hands.
Secular the gaze in the eye.
That place beneath the surface where everything
happens and visitors confuse their luggage.
Is going down an attempt to avoid constraints?
Severing any relationship with the present.
In that instant intruders arrive.
 
Deprived of repose, they linger – dowsers of stars and remains.
 
 
 
 
II.
 
Perhaps when yesterday comes again
it will bring the aroma of a looming aurora,
heaving and pristine.
And we’ll talk about the end of the world,
million dollar hotels under urban heavens.
 
I’ll be your Eloise.
 
 
 
 
III.
 
Would you come to the suburbs?
 
She endures fires and misery,
she drives to the underpass,
she shares the celestials.
 
Would you?
 
Periphery is physical awareness
of discontinuity.