Ivonne Mussoni

- Italy -


"Ivonne has her refined way to look at the world, to consider sacred both what it is lost and what left us" with these words Dacia Maraini signs an enthusiastic preface for the second book of Ivonne Mussoni “Sirene (Giulio Perrone Publisher, 2021). She recognized the value and uniqueness of this young voice, among the clearest in the panorama of new Italian poetry. Sirene is an ambitious book, which through the otherness of the myth speaks of nowadeys women and girls, she uses the power of symbols and a oracular, tragic and light dictation.

Apparently against the poetry of her generation, Ivonne Mussoni follows an indipendent lyrical traectory weavin her poetic vision with the search for myth.

 

Great female voices of international poetry have measured with the classics to narrate the archetypes which awake in the present, with different declinations have lent their voices to the distant poets; the poets as the American Nobel Prize Louise Glück, Carol Ann Duffy and Alice Oswald and the italian Rosita Copioli, who has inspired Ivonne Mussoni for a deep dialogue with marine element.

 

Sirene is a book of metamorphosis: the ancient mermaids from aerial and feathered turn into underwater creatures of the deep, one of them takes the word and has the shimmering darkness of the messengers, knows everything about us; it is a soft but incumbent voice, who knows and sees the primitive clue to every tremor. However this perfect mermaid as soon she touches the land, she turns into a girl, the archetype who is reborn in every misconceived creature.

 

There is something of the Dialogues with Leucò in the little prose that marks this transition, it is the unrequited love of the divine to the humans which the mermaid embodies, but it is also something very different. Sirens is a book of extreme violence born thank to a crystalline voice: it is inspired by the original myth of the Persephone’s abduction by her uncle, the god of the underworld Hades; the sirens are the only ones present but they watch without doing anything, they are witnesses suspended between ingenuity and sloth. For their failure to see they will be punished with the farthest sight, the one which reaches the heart with the knowledge of the abyss. They are transformed forever, as Persephone is transformed who also is halved, a blameless little girl but also queen of the underworld. Sirens is in fact a coming of-age novel, tells about  the lost of innocence necessary for a complete vision, the splitting of the youth in the cracking purity, which only in self-nostalgia becomes complete. This irretrievable collision, this heartbreak that runs through every youth, Ivonne Mussoni made it resound mysterious and bright, almost if she had really been crossed by a background’s song just beyond her point of no return.

 

Isabella Leardini

Corriere di Romagna, Giugno 2022

More about the poet

Poetry

  1. / (Untitled)

  2. / (Untitled)

  3. / (Untitled)

  4. / (Untitled)

  5. / (Untitled)

  6. / (Untitled)

  7. / (Untitled)