Lontano io

Through short verses animated by acoustic metamorphoses, the portrait of a faraway Genoa, clasped between the land and the sea, creates a dialogue with the other self, with loves lost and the ghost of absence.
Ernesto Franco’s poetry is born around a void, taking shape from a sense of absence, from the perception of unbridgeable distances: being far away from a city, from a love, from other people, de facto from oneself.
The first part of the collection is dedicated to Genoa, unstructured in its essence: a blade sharpened by the wind, where shreds of lost conversations reverberate. In the following sections, the love quarrels, the oxidation of memories, and the bitterness of goodbyes define a poetic code that is aware that a setback is a normal condition of life but also a welcoming void, and not a real defeat. Then there is a longer poem, the only one in the collection that is truly tragic: the monologue of a dying woman who asks for help, makes accusations, and doesn’t fully understand what is happening. They are verses that surface from the silence, they don’t conceal the wounds, they want to deal with the nonsense of nothingness: “but isn’t absence / all that makes existence?”