Sacro minore

The earthy holiness of the everyday, the details, the minutiae. The lesser holiness of our bodies as they encounter each other, intersect, take their distances – everything happening right here on earth. This is what lies at the heart of the new book by the most popular Italian poet today. In other words, what is sacred is life, its inescapable biology, the miracle of its persistence, the minutiae of glimpses, visions, and daily encounters that fill it with life, that bring it to life. Taking joy in the short form that he uses, Arminio captures in his poems things that we all recognize: a detail that triggers a feeling, the memory of a place that has to do with our childhood, some lost world. The strength of this poet lies in his ability to capture in an almost unearthly way the apparent banality of what lies around us, and the marvel of what it means to be alive.