The poetry of Antonio Spagnuolo, communicates feelings in a direct manner
By Maurizio Vitiello
The poetry of Antonio Spagnuolo, communicates feelings in a direct manner. The sensations and emotions that his poems give, however, are strong and intense, always managed in a refined and firm way, thanks to decades of memory and experience.
My acquaintance with the author dates back to the 1970s. He is a true gentleman, a physician by profession, yet devoted to his poetic spirit and inspiration. With this new publication, divided into sections, he renews his thoughts.
Over the years, I have moderated a series of meetings with wise and prominent speakers in which the figure of our poet has been examined and his pages carefully studied and scrutinized.
Every day he annotates on the page hints and reminiscences, memories and intangible secrets, and this practice allows a constant renewal making him an “evergreen” of poetic expression. This rare and precious quality is an exclusive characteristic of great poets. In fact, in time and with time, they give us valuable verses, full of noble certainty, like true anchors and wings of suggestions, emotions, and vibrations.
With a confident attitude, Spagnuolo extrudes his effusive temperament through a proven technique creating parameters of undoubted and paradigmatic knowledge.
Original writings always tend to sow short traces, yet capable to decree a panoramic view, truly wide-ranging, in a jutting, brightly soft architecture.
I always relate with extreme pleasure to Spagnuolo’s collections of poems, because I know that I will surely find unexpected scenarios, reworked in the light of an expressive, complete and brilliant maturity.
My critical interest in contemporary visual arts, well known by many readers, allows me to linger and investigate by the power of words the paths of imaginative ideas of artists, painters, sculptors, graphic designers, digital artists and many others. I find in visual artists many references and connections with the reflections inherent the analytical process of Antonio Spagnuolo’s poetic works. These similarities direct themselves, fly towards, reflect and penetrate the “conceptual paradise” manifested in the visual beauty of the images of hundreds of artists.
Mediterranean lights converge in the synthesis with dancing words expressing evening meeting networks that tell legends and stories.
Spagnuolo evaluates and shows sudden glimpses of today’s world, through dutiful patience and happy intuition regulating observation and commentary times.
Relationships, dreams, doubts, cycles, memories, whirlwinds and surprises sway in multifaceted visions and generate telepathic shivers of youth.
Sorrows, sacred destinies and landscapes derive from the suspensions of restrained sound and silent frenzy.
Moody fragmentations, instrumental orchestrations, empathic segmentations and the conjugations of the day, collect, like other themes, with a sane free will, the fruit of strong consciousness, which needs to bring complexities and arrangements back onto the memorial thread.
The simplicity of the assumptions, the humility of the scholar, the love of life, the vivid recollection of the beloved persons who are missing are the primary forces of Antonio Spagnuolo’s verses.
These peculiarities allow him to fit the words to meaningful thoughts by engraving them with semantics in order to express verses that can adequately portray episodes and specify existential steps.
The poet Antonio Spagnuolo, a “brilliant traveler of the soul” and a “skillful needle of conscience”, is prepared to the challenge of poetic expression and is, enormously, aware of his task.
He appreciates, in the first instance, the truths of the world; he interprets them channeling their meanings into the runway of cognitive reflections, which he selectively elaborates.
His speculations give shape to an exclamatory horizon and, in a wider connotative extension, he explicates sequences of events, all to be embraced.
In short, he solicits a theory of comprehensible paradigms on plural declinations in fast and clear notations.
Biography of the Poet
Antonio Spagnuolo was born in Naples, Italy on 21 July 1931. In the 1980s he founded and directed the magazine “Prospettive Culturali”, to which distinguished authors and scholars collaborated. He was a member of the editorial staff of the magazine “Realtà” in the same period of other well-known authors such as Aldo Capasso and Lionello Fiumi. Later, he founded and directed the magazine ‘Iride’.
He is the founder of the series of books ‘L’assedio della poesia’, which he directed from 1991 to 2006. He published nationally known poets and writers such as Gilberto Finzi, Gio Ferri, Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti, Massimo Pamio, Ettore Bonessio di Terzet, Giuliano Manacorda, Alberto Cappi, Dante Maffia and others.
He attends numerous national and international exhibitions of visual poetry, and his works have been included in many anthologies. He collaborates with cultural journals and magazines. He currently directs the book series “Le parole della Sybilla” for Kairòs editore and the online magazine “poetrydream”). He chairs “L’assedio della poesia 2020” award.
His works have been translated into French, English, Modern Greek, Yugoslavian, Spanish, Romanian, Arabic, and Turkish.
Antonio Spagnuolo has published several books. He lives in Naples. He is a retired doctor, and many times awarded for his long experience in poetry.
Selected poems from his book published in 2023
Mediterranean
I entwine brushes and flashes of gold
In the secret of glowing figures
In the swirling, delirious fire
Of new illusions.
Soft incursions of colours
And engravings of spatulas
Hatching shapes pursuing dreams,
In the marrows always careful
Of spaces and contradictions.
The canvas of innocence slips
While simulating reflections
From the foreseen contours showing
The time of candour and nudity.
***
Synthesis
The aroma of solitude disguises itself
Under the thumb, and in the few signs
Through which it urges us to rummage
An unexpected truth.
The ghost of memories arises
In the signs of coloured translations:
Images like spider webs
Painted in the crystal beating at the temples
Like a kaleidoscope trapped in the verse.
On the canvas the boundary of long, thin fingers
Reproducing itself in a thousand poses
Capable of piercing the mind.
Floating disclosure of time!
***
Words
Now I breathe stuck to the words
Rumbling at night in the shadows
Of memory.
I would like to strip away the skin from my arms
In the wave of your flame
Gentle like a story lost in bewitchments,
But you disappear at the edge of emptiness.
I stopped counting lawless days
Now. They are wholly incapable
Of reinventing dreams.
***
Dance
The figure of the dance swirls in the wind
Inviting us to soften the fury of the languid tail
As one who screams to the whim of the mountains
And to the long hours of the twilight
Growing old in passion.
A real-life dream is the time that stops
In the sparkle of an instant:
A totally different quiet appears in its devices!
The task is recomposing your limbs
To love once again
The flesh flaring up in the sublime.
Restless and alone, I await the impossible.
***
Evenings
Stop searching for springs
Fading in the quick turning away of shoulders:
I keep writing in full incomprehension
The shapeless dullness of the ancient despair.
My call has variations in the tired dark
Of a harmony that vibrates
And annihilates this old age of mine.
Our evenings will no longer return;
Their perfection seemed destined to infinity.
***
Network
Imprisoned in the tight spirals of the dream,
Where the cracks in the wall are motionless
And temporary affection enhances brightness,
The firmness of my faith ends.
It was only a load of damask skin
Eternity with its bodily form
In the key of secrets
While we are just a futile taunt of malice
Crushed by a beam in the vortex of memories.
I listen to the duplication of the reverse
On the network weaving thoughts
As it loses rewards and punishments.
***
Rust
In the time of the wrinkles
I remain pinned to the straws
That become gauze for the sores.
The boundaries of the glowing body
Arrange the epistolary exchange of life
Calculations for all the threads of lead
Parrying the blows of cutting darkness.
Doubt is still the promise,
Ephemeral, naked intimacy,
Insane retting of the brain.
Inside the secret hidden behind a key
What a point of surprise
Cruel rust!
***
Legend
Crossing the fire of Byzantium
Could reprocess the purification
Almost on the threshold of the shadows
That are breathless ghost of mystery.
A handmade backward flow of silence,
Wandering with complex fury
Unable to carry out the future
Or forge the struggle between time and eternity.
Spiral after spiral the refusal maddens
Like the purple call of the abstract
Petrified triangle of legend.
***
Stray dogs
Like stray dogs
My memories chase the moments
That we left interrupted, to the reemerging annoyance falling back into the mind.
The fading away brightness of the dream
Is a presentiment of the conclusion!
So the enchantment will end!
Loving beauties to the gaze
The outlines of a vanished sky
Like a secret lover
Or an enigma to be continuously deciphered.
To every room the sound returns unable
To believe that it was shaken by hurricanes.
_____________
