Songs About Love

A transparent vessel: the poetry of Jorge Centofanti, by Mario Satz. The traditional classification between classical and romantic poets, that is to say between those that follow inherited forms and those who innovate, twist and even dissolve them in never ending free associations, is insufficient. There are also prophetic poets like Victor Hugo or William Blake, cosmic poets like St John Perse or Whitman, and transparent poets like Jorge Centofanti, who seems to distance himself from any consecrated style to aspire for a meditated innocence. He crafts his language in such a way that it appears just written, fresh and new. In reality, more than the body of beings and things, his words rescue their aura, that soft enveloping radiance. One notes in his poetry the presence of mystics of all traditions, especially of those poets who speak of love with capitals. That is why, reading his songs and poems in the languages in which he feels comfortable -English, French, Spanish, Italian- we do not perceive anything accidental. He has written them after a long life, protecting the beat of his songs from the tormenting cacophony of the time we live in. If it is already difficult to preserve the child in us, the primitive sense and candid observer, it is even more so to keep the naturalness of language. His themes and subjects are always those of a singer in love, whether it is a river, a tree, a woman or a thought. After all, the poet knows that Love is one, even for those who do not have a chance to experience its splendour. After reading these poems, it seems as though we have not discovered anything new, and yet there one finds the persistent value that traverses chronology as the air through a net. Safe from rhetoric, our poet gets up, looks at the horizon and sees that which has never gone.