La bicicletta Bianca e altre biciclette di Iacuzzi

The poetry of Paolo Fabrizio Iacuzzi, born in 1961, is not what English readers might expect from an Italian poet of today. Some of its main elements may well be quite accessible, such as its evocations of the landscape of western Tuscany, the green woods and market gardens around Iacuzzi’s native town of Pistoia, and the connections these share with memory and family history. The totemic and allegorical figures peopling this landscape are unexpected, but nonetheless readily understood. The most unusual element of Iacuzzi’s poetry, and the one most likely to surprise English readers, is its curtness. Its language appears abrupt and unembellished and everywhere its themes are expressed with considerable emotional restraint. As perplexing as this may seem, it is, in fact, a highly inventive strategy. Iacuzzi exercises the capacity for brevity in the Italian language. He taps its contained rhythms and explores the evocative possibilities of single phrases. Similar ideas conceived by such poets as Giuseppe Ungaretti or Giorgio Caproni achieved success through the suspension of these isolated elements in space, but Iacuzzi employs them to create larger structures, finding illumination in collected sequences of fragments.