FRANCESCO BENOZZO
Poetry
Sciamanica
Poemi dai confini dei mondi / Poems from the Borders of the Worlds
English translations by Gray Sutherland
(Forum Editrice - Edizioni Kolibris, Udine - Ferrara, 2023
ISBN: 978-88-3283-371-3, pp. 436, € 25)
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«Visionary, bewildering, epic, wild, Francesco Benozzo has the unique capacity to bring the word back to the moment when it named the world the first time. What this poet consistently and surprisingly puts into action, poem after poem, is a revolution of the very idea of poetry: without compromise, and with its timeless and universal dimension, he can be considered as the Homer of post-modernity» (M. Lope Estrada).
Autoktonia
Poema del suicidio / Poem of the Suicide
Translated by Gray Sutherland
(Kolibris Editions, Ferrara, 2021
ISBN: 978-88-99274-93-1, pp. 82, € 12)
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This poem is an exploration without alibi and without rhetoric of the landscapes of death that precedes us and that await us.
The poet wanders there with awareness and grace, in a dreamlike and shamanic suspension in which the vital impulse coincides with a longing for annihilation, in the decomposition of the alphabets of time and of the word that creates and destroys. Autoktonia is the Old Greek word for “suicide”.
Máelvarstal
Poem of the Creation of the Worlds
Translated into English by Gray Sutherland
(Kolibris Editions, Ferrara, 2020
ISBN: 978-88-99274-70-2, pp. 74, € 10)
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Máelvrastal is a cosmogonic poem that tells of the birth of the universe fourteen billion years ago, in an astonishing dialogue between the science-based cosmologies explored by astrophysics in the last twenty years, the orally transmitted songs of ethnographic communities, and ancient mythological epic texts. In this poem, Benozzo, whom someone recently described as today's Homer, takes on a challenge that no poet before him, either ancient or modern, has ever attempted: to tell the story of the primordial chaos in which energy and matter, space and time took shape, in a poetic dizziness where every possible horizon, be it human or terrestrial, is wiped out.
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José Branco Castle
Poema dal limite del mondo / Poem from the Edge of the World
Translated into English by Gray Sutherland
(Kolibris Editions, Ferrara, 2019
ISBN: 978-88-99274-54-2, pp. 66.10 €)
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"Visionary, bewildering, epic, windy, Benozzo has an unique ability to bring the word back to the time when each and every word named the world for the very first time […]. What this poet consistently and surprisingly puts into action, poem after poem, is a revolution of the very idea of poetry: bluntly, and with its timeless and universal dimension, he is today's Homer of post-modernity "
Lope Estrada
Stóra Dímun
Poema camminato / A Walked Poem / Gonguríma
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Translated into English by Gray Sutherland
into Faroese by Jóanes Nielsen
With the reproduction of the original notebook.
(Kolibris Editions, Ferrara, 2019,
ISBN: 978-88-99274-50-4, pp. 46, € 8)
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This is a windy and visionary poem, which was composed on the smallest of the Faroe Islands, focusing on the alibiless revelations handed over to the existence of each of us by the comparison with the lives of the landscapes. Francesco Benozzo’s Italian text is accompanied by an English translation by the Canadian poet Gray Sutherland and a faroese translation by the writer and poet Jóanes Nielsen.
La capanna del naufrago /
The Castaway's Shack
Translated by Gray Sutherland
(Kolibris Editions, Ferrara, 2017,
ISBN 978-88-99274-31-3 pp. 52, € 6)
This is an esoteric, mythological epic poem about the wild side of our existence, a celebration of solitude as an unshared, heretical resource, and a salvifical vision of the poet, who is constantly being flung into prohibited places by the shipwreck and the failures of the human species.
Ferns in Revolt / Ferns in Revolt
Translated by Gray Sutherland
(Kolibris Editions, Ferrara, 2014,
ISBN 978-88-99274-21-4, pp. 40, € 6)
A travel into the depht of the landscape to speak of life and death, the deepness of the human heart, and the discomfort of poetry and the poet, always poised between dream and invective, between nostalgia for imperfection and the founding of new worlds.
