A Gaping Wound: Mourning in Italian Poetry ed. by Adele Bardazzi, Francesco Giusti and Emanuela Tandello (review)

Reviewed by: A Gaping Wound: Mourning in Italian Poetry ed. by Adele Bardazzi, Francesco Giusti and Emanuela Tandello Simona Di Martino A Gaping Wound: Mourning in Italian Poetry. Ed. by Adele Bardazzi, Francesco Giusti, and Emanuela Tandello. (Italian Perspectives, 54) Cambridge: Legenda. 2022. x+198 pp. £85. ISBN 978–1–839540–49–3. This volume successfully brings the Italian poetic tradition into recent international debates on mourning and the lyric. Although the Italian poetic tradition is marked at birth by two collections about the death and mourning of the beloved, Dante's Vita nuova and Petrarch's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, according to the editors Italian scholarship has solely explored individual authors and specific literary works without reflecting more broadly on connections between poetry and mourning in modern Italian productions. The collection offers, therefore, a double perspective: it explores, first, how lyric poetry deals with mourning, and second, the extent to which mourning can be considered a crucial dimension of lyric discourse. The work is informed by three different international debates: (1) the aesthetics of mourning, underpinned by Freud, Lacan, Derrida, Kristeva, and Butler, among others; (2) the ethics and poetics of elegy, including Ramazani's and Fuss's works; (3) the ideas of compensation, reparation, and redemption and contemporary reconsiderations of them, as testified by the work of Bersani. All these discourses are consistently addressed in the volume, resulting in a well-structured and coherent study with thematically deeply intertwined contributions. Though focusing on twentieth-century poetry, the essays also refer to earlier works to highlight cultural connections within the longer tradition and emphasise the transhistorical dimension of the literary genre in question. The volume consists of seven chronologically arranged contributions, ranging from the first half of the nineteenth century to the present. Emanuela Tandello's 'The Loss of Poetry: Leopardi's "Coro di morti"' opens the book with an innovative analysis of the chorus of mummies from the operetta morale Dialogo di Federico Ruysch e delle sue Mummie. The essay argues that the Coro is a contamination of genre since it blends the stanza di canzone with parody, ultimately questioning the lyric genre itself. In 'Carlotta's Ghost', Fabio Camilletti analyses Guido Gozzano's L'amica di nonna Speranza (1907) and L'esperimento (1909). Camilletti examines the multifaceted presence in the poems of the 'phantasm' as an emblem of a secret encrypted in the unconscious (per Abraham and Torok's psychoanalytical theory) and unveils the fictive mourning of the lyrics pursued through a deliberate self-deception. End Page 419 Francesco Giusti's 'Mourning over her Image: The Re-enactment of Lyric Gestures in Giorgio Caproni's "Versi livornesi"' analyses a collection of poems devoted to the poet's mother Anna gathered in a section of his 1959 book Il seme del piangere. Giusti shows how Caproni represents mourning as an experience that is both personal and shareable by combining a personal loss with the retrieval of Cavalcantian poetics. The essay then effectively contributes to the theory of the lyric in its historical-contextual and transhistorical dimensions. The dichotomy of mourning, as both a private and a shareable experience, is also explored in Martina Piperno's 'Giorgio Bassani, the Poet-Ghost, and the Memorial Duty of the Survivor'. Piperno proposes that Bassani's collection of poems Epitaffio (1974) and In gran segreto (1978), both included in the volume In rima e senza (1982), can be understood as an 'in morte' section of Bassani's lifetime poetry book where his own experience coincides with the largest historical trauma of the twentieth century, incorporating Dante's model and infernal journey. Piperno shows how the author retrieves features typical of epitaphs but presents a model of mournful poetry that detaches itself from the elegiac mode. The theme of traumatized collectivity and inner struggles also emerges in Marzia D'Amico's 'The Space of Mourning: Elettra's mise en abyme'. D'Amico analyses the ways in which Amelia Rosselli acts on the rewriting of women in literary collective consciousness and how she redefines the authorial state of women writers. D'Amico argues that through the rewriting of the figure of Electra, who in Rosselli's version is not...