by Antonio Catalfamo (Professor, University of Messina. Cesare Pavese scholar. – Sichuan International Studies University (CHINA)
Maria Teresa Liuzzo has been present in the literary world for many years, as a poet, novelist, tireless cultural activist, event organizer, and founder of esteemed magazines. She therefore needs no introduction, either to a national or international audience. Authoritative critics such as Antonio Piromalli, Giorgio Bárberi Squarotti, Mario Sansone, and Ferruccio Ulivi (to name just a few) have addressed her multifaceted work, analyzing it from various perspectives and using different methodologies, confirming its validity beyond the confines of any school, current, or, worse still, caste or clique.
Having lived in the Calabrian province, in the far south of the Italian peninsula, has helped her avoid becoming entangled in the labyrinth of lobbies. with their entrenched vices, harassing associations, and standardized literary currents that clip the poet’s wings and restrict his inspiration within stereotyped patterns.
But Maria Teresa Liuzzo is an absolutely free spirit, shaping poetic material in a completely original way, avoiding paralyzing molds and borrowings. If we want to find a precedent in Calabrian literature, we can certainly turn to Alba Florio, a poet reevaluated by Antonio Piromalli, who, coincidentally, had Liuzzo awarded the very prize established to perpetuate the memory of Florio, who, in the 1930s and 1940s, was able to break free from the straitjacket of hermeticism, creating an authentically existential poetry.
Regarding Alba Florio, Piromalli speaks of a „solitary and dramatic poetry” typical of the best Calabrian literature, represented not only by her but also by poets like Lorenzo Calogero. The same definition can be used for Maria Teresa Liuzzo, Because an existential drama lies at the heart of her poems, an authentic drama here too, not stereotyped, corresponding to a literary pose, as happens, conversely, in her hermetic and decadent poetry, whose broad arc extends, unfortunately, to the present day. It is a drama that dates back to her childhood, emerging from the novels Liuzzo has published and now reverberating in her verse, apart from a few happy interludes spent outside her native Calabria, with her uncle and aunt Scipioni.
A drama that stems, then, from the search for the Absolute, toward which her entire life tends, without ever being reached. God, as in the poems of David Maria Turoldo, is experienced as a constant question, not an answer.
A drama that also consists in the increasingly difficult relationship with others, which determines existential „failure” in a society increasingly founded on selfishness. The tireless search for the Absolute, existential failure, are, for Piromalli, characteristics of the finest tradition. Calabrian literary tradition, along with a thirst for justice, which remains unsatisfied and, therefore, generates pain. Maria Teresa Liuzzo possesses a cosmic pessimism of Leopardi’s origins, which emerges from her depiction of nature, which often lacks the lush characteristics of the Calabrian landscape, as it appears to us in its natural dimension. True, there are flowers and plants that dominate the Mediterranean flora of that beautiful land, but the entire landscape becomes painful, becoming an objective correlative of the feelings that stir the poet’s soul.
Antonio Piromalli’s definition of Maria Teresa Liuzzo’s poetry as belonging to the „twentieth-century camp” might seem anodyne, as the poet lived chronologically in the twentieth century, and this is an evident and inseparable fact. But this definition is far from obvious, as much of the poetry of the last century thrives on „rehashes” of the past, on „romanticisms,” on „classicisms,” on Out-of-season „symbolisms.” And Leonardo Sciascia rightly said that these „perfect” imitators of preconceived and schematic models resemble monkeys who, placed in front of the keys of a typewriter, are capable of replicating a Shakespearean sonnet. A multitude of monkeys can reproduce the entire library of the British Museum. „Perfection” operates at the expense of originality.
Maria Teresa Liuzzo, on the other hand, is not a slavish imitator of stale models from past centuries, repurposed by others like pre-cooked foods. She belongs to the poetic sensibility of the twentieth century, with the caveat that, as Dario Bellezza rightly pointed out, the greatest poet of the twentieth century is a poet of the nineteenth century: Giacomo Leopardi, who paved the way for „modernity,” for a new perception of a changing reality. Maria Teresa Liuzzo, too, as Piromalli observes, lives the reality of
Her time is constantly changing, like the waters of a river (as Heraclitus taught us), in which a man or a woman cannot step twice, because it is an eternal flow. Therefore, according to Piromalli, Liuzzo is far from „traditionalism,” understood as a tired re-proposal of a supposed literary and, specifically, poetic „tradition.” Her poetry exhibits a „continuous metamorphosis of the word,” which adapts to that of reality, a succession of „metaphors” that express an „ethical world,” „presupposed or affirmed,” which, in turn, expresses a continually shifting consciousness, denouncing, that is, a „suffering consciousness,” tormented, adhering to the folds of the „great and terrible world” (to use Gramsci’s words).
Maria Teresa Liuzzo, even physically, is one of those Calabrian women „carrying amphorae” described by Cesare Pavese in his letters from anti-fascist exile in Brancaleone, heirs to a classical Greek heritage. And she re-invents the „mystery” of those women. We will return to this dimension shortly. Meanwhile, we want to highlight how Liuzzo is also heir to the folk poets, present throughout the world, beyond Magna Graecia, as depicted jointly (coincidentally) by Giuseppe Bonaviri and Pablo Neruda.
Bonaviri recounts that in his town, Mineo, in Sicily, for centuries folk poets have gathered in front of a rock to recite their verses. This is because there are „mythical” places where gravitational waves emanate from the chthonic and hypochthonic worlds, generating well-being or ill-being in humans, almost as if they were water diviners. Such are the places where temples and churches stand, for example. Poets record these benevolent gravitational waves as inspiration for their verses.
Pablo Neruda writes about folk poets: „Natural poets of the earth, / hidden in the furrows, / […] if we understood / water / perhaps it would speak like you, / if the stones told their lament / or their silence, / with your voice, brothers, / they would speak. / Numerous / you are, like the roots. / In the ancient heart / of the people / you were born / and from there comes / your simple voice. / You have the hierarchy / of the silent clay amphora / abandoned in a corner, / it sings suddenly / when it overflows / and its song is simple, / it is only earth and water. / In the same way I want them to sing / my poems, / to carry / earth and water, / fertility and song, / to the whole world.”
Maria Teresa Liuzzo’s poetry is, indeed, an ancient amphora, containing water and earth, sources of life: the earth from which we were biblically formed; the water with which we were baptized. Both sources of „fertility” and „song,” extreme manifestations of the mystery of human existence, which continually flows and renews itself, enriched with new meanings at every moment. Liuzzo’s poetry is simple, „modern,” according to Piromalli’s definition, and, at the same time, „ancient,” with distant roots that reach back through the centuries, to the rhapsodists, to Homer, to the folk poets scattered across the world, and very present in its south, in Greek and Byzantine Calabria, which glides along the Strait of Messina, between Scylla and Charybdis, on the wave of „myth,” where Ulysses, tied to the mast of his ship, sought to listen to the voices of the sirens, to penetrate, precisely, the „mystery” of life.
Cesare Pavese, in his essay, „Two Poetics,” wrote that poetry always arises from a „mystery.” Hermetic poetics (the first of the two to which the Piedmontese poet refers in the title) stops there, and the poet manifests all his „amazement,” revels in it, and seeks to communicate this „wonder” to the reader. Realist poetics (at least as Pavese conceives it) begins with the „mystery,” analyzes it rationally through comparison with the world he has created within himself, with its conscious and unconscious components, including the individual and collective unconscious, and, through this comparative analysis, arrives at the ultimate meaning of human existence. Maria Teresa Liuzzo does so, drawing on her remote Calabrian, Greek, or rather Magna Graecia roots, delving deep within herself, listening to the voices of nature, water and earth, the ever-changing unfolding of life, to continually find new poetic inspiration, new „metaphors” (always following Piromalli’s reasoning), which condense the ultimate meaning of existence, hers and that of humanity as a whole. In this sense, as Franco Ferrarotti reminded us, poetry is the highest manifestation of humanity, of being, in that, precisely through the medium of „metaphor,” it gives the simplest, most humble existence a „universal” meaning. But poetry, understood in this way, is rare today in the technological world, and Maria Teresa Liuzzo is one of its few representatives.
Antonio Catalfamo
© 2026, DetectivPress. Toate drepturile rezervate.
