She died at the age of 75 Patrizia Cavalli, the poet who was able to transform her lines into a pop phenomenon without losing critical acclaim. In her compositions all the variations of human feeling: love, pain, pleasure. Born in Todi in 1947, Cavalli arrived in Rome in 1968, after passing through Ancona. In the capital she knows Elsa Morante and it is to her, she will tell, that she owes her becoming a poet. In the meantime, in Rome she is studying Philosophy at the University. His first collection of poems, My poems will not change the world, was born precisely from the attendance of Elsa Morante, to whom he had asked for an opinion. They come out for Einaudi in 1974, dedicated to Elsa, as well as other collections.
Love and music become his muses. Of his immediate but classical language, the literary critic Alfonso Berardinelli he said: “His vocabulary is mixed and hybrid, but his diction is invariably pure. It is immediately clear that the purity of diction is precisely the purpose for which he writes. When something is precisely said, the mind heals from malaise, from the disease of imprecision ”.
His translator into English Geoffrey Brock he said of her: “One of the things I love most in the Italian of your poems is the way in which your language, so contemporary, makes use of and gives life to certain traditional techniques”.
Cavalli wrote poetry and filled the theaters, giving literature a stage dimension. It is no coincidence that a collection of his poems is entitled Always open theater (1999): “The stage is mine, this theater is mine / I am the audience, I am the foyer / I have this good thing, it is all mine / so I want, empty / and empty it is. Full of my delay “. Her readings at the Rome Auditorium they attracted thousands of people. Real shows in which she sang and recited poems of her choice, including her beloved Emily Dickinson.
The poetic collections of Patrizia Cavalli are published by Einaudi and translated around the world. In the United States from the prestigious Farrar, Straus & Giraux. Among the most recent titles: Lazy divinity and lazy lot, Datura e Wonderful life.
In 2019 she also experimented with prose for the first time, giving it to the press With Japanese steps, always published by Einaudi, which merged unpublished texts and his old writings. He wrote to you: “I was not born to be reasonable, I was born to love, to be happy …”.
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