Literary Presentations

"... poetry appears not only as affirmation or denial of something, but question, continuous interrogation ... reading of the ego, but even more reading of men. The poetry of Giuseppina Lesa can be fully grasped only by evaluating this general relationship with the world. The word finds the right place and knows how to be literary and colloquial. "

“The pen of Lesa can be tormented and impetuous ... The common denominator of the poems is undoubtedly the tension towards inner research and introspective withdrawal. The "pathos" is recreated through real poetic brushstrokes sublimating them in metaphorical images of intense suggestion.”

"A climb full of silences keeps me on the road. Many colors are not afraid of biting the life of words and they do not know what adventure is daily. If you pass your hands on these sheets of Giuseppina Lesa I hope that some traces of color will remain between your fingers. Dear reader, what are you doing tonight? Continuous energy is hidden in words. Looking for the next is useless if what we are is empty. Surprise is the only way to fill it. "

“Destroyed is the ladder / and the summit I leave it to you / that from above / struts feathers / without color". These verses taken from the poetry of Giuseppina Lesa published in the anthology La pazienza del mistero, are echoed by the many images surfacing in the artist's works. In fact, Lesa combines, with a desperate search for essentiality, poetry written to visual poetry through a sort of mirroring of the same autobiographical subject. "

The thoughts of the heart ...

 The poems of Giuseppina Lesa can be inserted without forcing into the thoughts of the heart, that is, of the depth of being; they are crossed by pain asking us if, involved by it, "we ruin in oblivion or in the hope of the divine light". The dialectic between these dimensions is harsh, expressed effectively by these images: "As oxen we pull the weight / As a flame extinguished the darkness / As lawyers without right / As a lie without truth". The sensitivity and the spiritual itinerary of Giuseppina Lesa inevitably lead her as an intrinsic logic to dramatically ask the question of the relationship between suffering and God. The thoughts of the heart become an invocation from the depths of being: I need to see some signs like Thomas, who helps hope and "I ask you / Do you love me? I want to see!" The poems of Lesa are an expression of the time of the Being that underlies that of Exist. ...

In this study I present one of the poems included in the anthology Usa ogni cura (Castiglione di Sicilia CT: Il Convivio Editore 2017. Preface by Giuseppe Manitta). The beautiful lyric 10 agosto, San Lorenzo refers to the famous X agosto by Giovanni Pascoli, but the contents are substantially opposite.

10 AGOSTO, SAN LORENZO

Domenica d’agosto.
Le foglie alla leggera brezza
battono le mani.
Silente è la strada
e nel giardino perfetto,
annoto ombre più distese
e luci lavate dalla pioggia.
Col cuculo e i merli
chiamo;
trascorrono le ore e i pensieri,
i verdi sembrano tutti uguali.
Che mi resta ancora da fare
prima che la notte allunghi le sue braccia
e lasci il posto alle stelle?

Desidèri inascoltati scivoleranno
nel buio di un infinito
che non parla.

Dusk has begun, time is running out before the night fully manifests itself. It's Sunday, a day of rest from the daily grind. The place is a garden of variously green plants that, in the uncertain light that accompanies sunset, already appear to have a more uniform hue. Toward the end of the day, there is still time for contemplation, reflection on life and death, in a concrete and metaphorical space where nature has taken on the aesthetics of human hands and minds: a perfect garden, well-tended, far from the noise and clamor of life. The evening lights glisten from the rain that has washed away dust and even sweat in the shadows that stretch out, also relaxed by the toil of life. The poet, immersed in the deepening shadows, is one with the arcane nature, with wild and nocturnal birds like the cuckoo, black and mysterious like the blackbird, with their melancholy call to which the woman responds in complete harmony. As we wait for the shooting stars in the darkness of the night, the desires that legend holds will be fulfilled if expressed to the stellar fragments on this special summer night emerge from the depths. In this moment of inner contemplation, the poet does not delude herself; she knows that her desires, however intense and painful, will not be heard by a dark infinity that does not speak, that does not respond to the human heart. Thus, reflection and hope in the gift of the dreamed-of response of the shooting stars lead to the awareness that only the darkest nothingness awaits man in solitude, and the great silence is that of God. But it is beautiful to aesthetically enjoy the quietest nature, the evening lights gleaming with rain, as if for the most beautiful spectacle, where the leaves clap their hands at the touch of the gentlest breeze, a representation made of nature's most secret shadows together with the poet, the painter, a shadow among shadows, who with her creative eyes has composed the most beautiful artist's painting and with her creative words the most beautiful poem.

A stunning moment of contemplation, artistic par excellence, in the beauty of the image created by the colors that have taken on the appearance of evening and almost nocturnal, to which the poetic words give voice before everything fades and falls silent in the darkness, along with the emotions aroused by man's vain expectations.

Finally, a nod to the poetry of Giovanni Pascoli for a substantial difference from Giuseppina Lesa's "10 Agosto, San Lorenzo." The poet sings of the desperation of the vain wait for the return home of his father, killed by the wicked. Here too, the sky is distant, but not so far away as to be insensitive to human pain, so that the immortal infinite, the "Heaven" or kingdom of God, weeps its shower of stars over the evil of life on Earth, where man is therefore not alone, as on the contrary in Giuseppina Lesa, a poet who in this poem gives meaning in Art to the unhappy existential condition of humans before their entry into an infinity indifferent to human pain and hope.

"The titles of Giuseppina Lesa's collections are doors through which, once crossed, one finds oneself faced with a rugged and lush nature, enough to make one hold one's breath for a moment, a space where she loves to trace and undertake paths, inviting guests to follow her as a guide.

She never chooses the easy way, or rather, she doesn't choose; she proceeds through brambles, flowering plains, and the tangle of countless rough patches that obstruct the path, letting herself be guided by instinct, by sensitivity, with the aim of reaching that light that she hopes to find soothing, liberating, and pacifying.

In her latest work, VITA, Giuseppina's poetry is similar to the attempt to draw a map that is useful to the soul, to the spirit, so as not to find oneself trapped in some isthmus where one hears the echo: Boredom, boredom, boredom/breathing is not living, or mutilation of existence by striking at some half-submerged pitfall."

"And it seems to me that life, this short life, is nothing but this: the constant cry of these emotions that drag us along, that we sometimes try to enclose in the name of God, in a political faith, in a ritual that reassures us that everything is in order in the end, in a great, great love, and the cry is beautiful and resplendent. Sometimes it's a pain. Sometimes it's a song."

"Yes, sometimes it's a song."

"There's a crack in everything. This is how the light enters."

Thus, with these two quotes, we can begin a discussion on the multifaceted art of Giuseppina Lesa. The first comes from the final page of the booklet L'ordine del tempo, Adelphi 2020, by Carlo Rovelli. Lesa takes the final sentence with a subtle variation: Sì, talvolta è un canto (Yes, sometimes it's a song), and uses it as the seal of her diary," Sono un guardiano di greggi (I am a herdsman). Sixteen years of life and art 2006-2022. She knows that art, - engraved plate, painted canvas, poetry, music - can transform pain into song, drawing light from the cracks in history, as in the quote from Leonard Cohen's "Anthem" from the album The Future, 1992: "There is a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in."

The breadth and depth of Lesa's vision are immediately apparent, open to dialogue not only with other artists, but with writers, poets, musicians, and spiritual masters.

Together with them, Lesa probes the profound substance of the human condition with exemplary commitment and perseverance, exercised within the inner core of her own conscience as a woman and an artist.