One day you will tell me”, written by Irma Kurti
Published by Southern Arizona Press, USA.
For years, I have followed the poetic activity of Irma Kurti with inexhaustible interest and great curiosity. Engaging with Kurti has granted me the opportunity to express myself over time. For me, it is a renewed honor to be able to open the precious pages of a new book written by her. Each is so full of life, emotions, and images that look with great passion at a past that is increasingly receding from the liquid everyday life.
Hers is a poetic attention to the particularities of situations and images that have the potential to bring back vivid memories. They are pleasant to remember, like a breeze of fresh air, but at the same time painful because they reveal our distance from that Edenic and carefree yesterday, which was lived in the fullness of feelings and in the company of loving figures, such as the parents to whom this collection is dedicated.
If it is true that a feeling of deep melancholy and painful expectation predominates (albeit an illusory one), these compositions are also the preferred means by which the Poetess—even today—can keep alive that bond with her loved ones. They are indissoluble presences in her existence that inhabit every domain of her experience in an omnipresent way.
As already observed elsewhere, the image of one’s own parents is formed not only in the moments of serenity in which they were limited to an age of happiness, when life flowed normally without particular worries, but also in the bitterest moments. The Poetess recalls the latter with a mixture of sadness and resentment, as in the lyric dedicated to her beloved mother: “And the roads extended before you / without end and beginning / as in the twilight, you tried to collect / the last pieces of your desires that vanished / just like some white clouds.” Poetry itself becomes a feeling of time and is gradually colored with images of torment due to the affliction of the pain felt by her ill parents, with gasps of escape and the desire to hope, but also with careful descriptions of environments, circumstances, and the changing times and seasons. The whole work profoundly evokes the changes of time, its unstoppable evasion that makes us discover fragile, transient beings in constant evolution subjected to the inclement human weather of detachment, mourning, and absence. These are moments—to cite Van Gennep—in which the humans consciously elaborate the passage from one stage to another and in which the liminary frontier areas frequently represent experiences of gloom and confusion, lived in an excruciating loneliness and a frantic search for reasons that, unfortunately, cannot be identified.
However, the book presents a wide thematic variety, which makes it enjoyable and persuasive to the reader. We rediscover the feeling of nostalgia for the homeland (“As I dream of rinsing my body / there where the waterfall flows,” and again, “We had the sea close by, it didn’t take much / to hold the waves in our hands”) but also get a look at the canonical existential vexations that situate humans in insurmountable aporias and impracticable dilemmas (“Who will accompany you in a dream, / […] when I won’t be any more in this life?”).
The Poetess also reflects on the authentic value of the word and the ease of saying, which often reveals hypocritical verbal constructions (“no one believes in their words /even those who wrote them”)—a sign of a reality in which there is an irremediable gap between meaning and signifier and in which incommunicability and sloppiness, even within the world of feelings, which should be ardently protected, seem to take lead roles. All this is contrasted with a timeless, metaphysical language made up of sounds perceived in the interior, of unspoken dialogues and perceptions that bring the Poetess closer to her loved ones—a sort of imperceptible ultrasound who strengthens, albeit in silence, a bond of love that never faded, not even with death (“The power of your thought will take me to you / to make all sadness vanish”). Irma Kurti, who is a poetess inscribed in the etymological history of the word “poetry,” shows herself to be an attentive and passionate woman when writing on paper, thanks to her brilliant attitude and the creative spark that propels her. Images, shapes, and changes fascinate us: “I collect streams of rain / in my hands like small / ponds and transform / lightning into lamps / to illuminate your road / when you come back to me.”
