Fiore di poesia. Alda Merini’s poetry

Alda Merini’s poetry is beautiful to hurt. Alda is for all those who are not afraid of suffering in loving. She knows love through pain and has left to the world her powerful words in verse.

Fiore di poesia 1951-1997

I looked for some flowers,
you know, in my singing system,
some insipid corolla
good to want some of my children.
I get drunk on cursed wine,
stone excavation in fantasy,
I pretend to be sea now, hill,
and meanwhile I abandon myself on the streets
which lead to the lazaretto.

Fiore di poesia includes lyrics written between 1951 and 1997 taken from different collections. The purpose of this edition is to offer a literary journey in which to discover Alda and her poetry.

The preface by Maria Corti leads us through the years of the adolescent Merini to the most mature woman: between unpublished and not writings, the poetry of Alda Merini traces her loves, like the one for Giorgio Manganelli or Michele Pierri, to whom she dedicates:

Love forgive me: I am brutal and I would like to anoint you with oil,
I pursue you and I would like
that before you I was a carpet,
I love you and I gather in my silence,
but I’m afraid, afraid of myself,
of these hideous lilies of hunger and mud
that grow in my mind.

In her poems we also find faces of women like Sappho, Emily Dickinson or Silvia Plath.

Poor Plath too high for the miseries of the earth
death certainly better
and a crematorium
to continuous wind burns,
Silvia better the futuristic enterprise
of a woman who wanted to be a woman
which has been pawed by a female man.

Passions and obsessions, dreams and nightmares, this edition of Fiore di Poesia preserves the warm and tormented voice of the Milanese poet.

The poetry of Alda Merini

Alda Merini was born “together with spring” but her poetry knows no seasonality.
She is the most beloved Italian poet of all time and the reason is quite obvious: Merini gives us her sufferings and to us readers, it seems we can’t help but embrace them. Forced into a reality whose pains are being hallucinated, Alda finds a way to win it.

There was a harlot in me
of the saint of the bloody and the hypocrite.
Many gave my way of living a name
and I was only a hysterical.

Like a phoenix, the poetry of Alda Merini resurrects the woman and with her all of us. Who does not recognize herself in her verses?

I’ll dig out where I’ve got the roots
not to look for me, not to help me
you will discover that it was hidden
for the ferocity of unhealthy customs.

Alda writes in one go. Sometimes it is a therapy, as suggested by doctors during her stay in the asylum, more often it is a need. The poet cannot help it. Writing allows her to put pen to paper impressions, suggestions, emotions about the world, herself, about love.

The asylum is a great sounding board
and delirium becomes echo

Imagined brittle among the four walls of her room she appears strong in her verses. Her voice is “that proceeds from darkness rather than from too much wisdom of the mind”. Personal but universal, this is how Alda Merini’s poetry is.

“I accepted the evil
and has become an incandescent dress.
It has become poetry.
It has become a fire of love for others ”

“Poetry is a flower, it should not be trampled.”: pick up this flower, read the poetry of Alda Merini.