Age of the duck-hare: the poetry of Valerio Magrelli
published in Agenda Vol 45 No.4 / Vol 46 No. 1, May 2011
Valerio Magrelli is one of the brightest stars of Italian poetry, widely acclaimed since the appearance of his first collection Ora Serrata Tesserae when he was twenty three. The title of that collection gives a hint of the kind of poet he is — it’s the irregular, serrated demarcation between the retina and the circumferential tissue inside the eye. So specialist is the title that when he went to the optician some months after the book came out, the optician remarked ‘I didn’t realise we were colleagues, I see you’ve written a book . . .’
The scientific term directs us to a poetry preoccupied with visual perception of the world, and the forensic attention applied simultaneously to the gaze. The blank page is ‘like the cornea of an eye’ where the poet ‘embroider(s)/an iris and in the iris etch(es)/the deep gorge of the retina’:
A gaze then
sprouts from the page
and a chasm gapes
in this yellow notebook.
