Four is symbol of division and closure, number
of attentuation and emphasis, a number which, in its duplicity
substantiates and informs the single poems as it does the entire
book. It is the solid seal for an experience of loss and anxious
searching.
Poems from the book In quattro by Gianfranco
Palmery
Translation by Barbara Carle
I
The year, the hour, the cross, the hinges
of the world, everything is divided in four
parts—in space and time
we thus measure sacrifice and loss.
IV
I'm upon myself like a falcon
or a brooding buzzard on a trestle
laughable bird of prey resigned to mortification
in the gloomy ruffled plumage where he nestles.
XVIII
—Why an eternal mask, what hides
behind the need to hide oneself
behind a mask (the metal studded
style, the unravelled mythologies…)?
Look: behind the mask there is the back
of the mask, the hollow surface
of the cast, its intimate face
without face, a vacuous lack.
XXIV
Luminous and nocturnal, emulous moons
or stars that rise in pallor, run
resplendently through the arch
of their obedience and docilely extinguish
themselves once they reach the other hemisphere—
far away from we who remain and grow weary in the flesh:
poems are like this but their mystery is here
and it runs from the mind to the hand.
XXIX
As though between four walls or four boards—
in a room or a coffin: the quatrain
is the cell, the sepulcher, the lock up
—it is the measure of closure.
XXXV
Syllabize be alive: shudder of vertebrae—
paradigmatical voice of to verberate
make a din, suffer loss; dactylic feverling
which discharges to darkness perishing.
... In fact, even with every quatrain emitting a suffering need of the
absolute, Palmery is animated and animates us, not with that need, but
instead with his way of putting it. The form he chooses is a composed,
complex language, with internal, external rhyme, only optical at times,
bizarre, but apt, metaphors. His images are those of a baroque poet who
wants to touch both mind and senses, without ever crossing over into rococo
effects, but also without any illusion of piercing with words the essence
of life, or even less, the divine ear...
Stefania Portaccio “Galleria” on the book
In quattro (In Four) *
THE QUATRAIN AND THE MEASURE OF THOUGHT
..In the book In quattro (In Four) Palmery pushes
into the most impervious borderland between abstraction and the sayable.
The succession of quatrains finds in the signals of the recluse, as in
Wallace Stevens’ poetry, “universal loss and grace”.
