“What's under the sky”, when nature is poetry

What more than poetry can show us the beauty in which we are immersed? Poetry, in fact, is multiform, ductile, malleable. Like water, it can become wave and current, tear and dew, puddle and rain. It can make us fly in the air and become wind, but also breath, breath, breath. Poetry can warm like fire and like the fire of a torch it can illuminate our path. It can make itself land, and support us, host us, nourish us. The verses of the great poets can do all the beauty that is inside and outside of us as shown by "What is under the sky" (Mondadori, 2022, pp. 159) collection of twentieth century poems intended first of all to young people and very young and focused on the thousand metaphors with which nature reveals itself. To collect and comment on the verses (flanked by the beautiful illustrations by Carla Manea) was Chiara Carminati , one of the most popular authors for boys and girls.

We ask her how the choice of the poems that make up “What is under the sky” was born.

“Unlike other countries, in Italy there are not many collections of poetry intended for pre-adolescent children. I liked the idea of enriching this shelf, but this time assuming not the role of author but that of reader: I had in mind to draw on the catalogs of Italian poetry to choose texts that, although not written specifically for children, could be read, recognized and appreciated by them too. I took the four elements (water, air, fire, earth) as a guiding thread, mostly as a metaphorical starting point: I was not so interested in having a collection of poems on nature, as in seeing how through the natural elements we can talk about us ".

How can poetry "tell us" about the world around us and what is inside of us?

“The concreteness of water, air, earth and fire helps us to paint what is most elusive, what happens inside us and which is sometimes difficult to transform into words. For this we need the words of poets. In their verses, the natural elements that surround us become representations of what happens to us: the stream, the sea, the clouds, the flame, the seed, the clod of earth ... they no longer represent only themselves, but also the 'cheerfulness of character, the calm, the desire, the passion and the hopes that inhabit us ”.

At a certain point in the book we read that "poetry is like water" ... but is it really like that?

“This is also a metaphor. Like water, it can have many forms: it can be rhyming but also in free verse, it can close an image in very few words but also expand into a narrative. It can even break the typographical order to achieve new expressive effects. It is the realm of experimentation, the place where language is kept alive. Just as life is renewed in water ”.

What is the value of poetry in today's world, so technological and frenetic as to seem very little poetic?

“I don't think poetry and technology conflict with each other. On the contrary. I am convinced that technology can always offer new means of expression, and that poetry can exploit them with great profit. The problem is that very often the object of poetic writing is identified as something affected, delicate, sentimental. It is probably the legacy of many poems memorized at school desks. But poetry does not allow itself to be caged by this limiting conception: in poetry one can say everything and in many ways. Poetry is a tool for communicating, and it can do so with all the means at our disposal. Certainly, however, it requires concentration, attention, time: not only to look at the world with other eyes, but also to distribute the silences between words, which light up their meanings ".

Which poem among those in the book would you recommend for the time we are living?

“I would recommend them all, without exception. They are texts that can be read on several levels, so that at different moments in our life they are perhaps able to tell us something new. The choice to compose an anthology with the voices of many poets goes precisely in the direction of offering a varied panorama, within which each reader can build their own preferences. And maybe then go and discover other works by beloved authors. But there is one verse in particular, it is by Luigi Nacci and it is the last of the last poem. It is a verse that somehow encompasses them all, and that we can keep close to each other like a precious voice, always: 'Stand in wonder' ".