Dance of the EQUINOX - OUT OF PRINT
Floriana Ferro’s first collection of poems, Danza di Equinozi won the Italian national literary prize Cardinal Branda Castiglioni in 2011. Published now in English in her own translation, Dance of the Equinox explores the idea of poetry as means of cultural and political emancipation. In particular, these poems locate the author’s sexual and political identity in a country still dominated by conservative and religious ideas about women and sexuality.
Each of these short and fragmentary poems is a piece of a broken mirror, clues in a game of hermetic illusions. Some are meant to be read vertically, some horizontally, while others are designed to be understood by reading alternate lines. The result is a modern lyrical vision celebrating love, Nature, the delirium of art and the capacity of poetry to resist the alienating pressures of capitalist globalization.
Cover image: Wassily Kandinsky, Heavy Circles
Author photo credit: Salvatore Giovanni De Francesco
Sample Poems
Sappho
a sound of choice is blowing unduly through pine fronds aspirated jargon in a Silen’s skin drawing the chariot of Aphrodite
Desire
in an empty space of words resounds spreading to the pleasure centres expelling faces from the stage concerts for piano wings of thieving magpies squabbles among actors scent of wicker cradles childhood plastic Avant-garde of thought Surrealism of feeling
Calls
calls of a deflowered morning knock at my eyelids they devilishly beat while I inhale the breath of dailylight I’m a bat beleaguered by drops from stalactites
Swallows
swallows are troubling the wintertime sky surrounding my giddiness with a scissor-like screech in your treading steps the announcement of new seasons
