by Maria Pia Marchelletta

Foreword

In this irrational world, poetry evokes consoling emotions which provide us with security and love.

How does Maria’s poetry supply us with this consolation? Is it a momentary lapse against confusion in her life? Does she have a spiritual crisis in her life? As I read her poetry, I feel her homesickness and spiritual journey, which now later in life, are comforting to revisit. Her images incarnate meanings of her youth, love and nostalgia in vivid ways. Her poetic passion sometimes leans toward craft-centered language poetry. In Journey of the Soul, she launches her quest for great spiritual poetry derived from memories of her home town, San Donato, and from her childhood.

As a painter, she strives to display her nostalgic feelings, even more intensified by today’s realities and images. These are reborn in the language of her lyrics. She creates her poetic equivalents, more real than the actual descriptions of visits to her sanctuary. Her inspired anguishes there give some clarification to the entanglements of her religious soul. In communion with her attachment to the Pure Spirit, her tropes appear abstract or may be a simple embodiment of her cinematic voice.

We must accept her poetic lyrics and negotiate with the strength of her intensity and lucidity. Only then can you enjoy her Petrarchan love poetry, her varying dialects of epic tales, her painful strife with Pitman’s shorthand, her heartfelt confessions on life’s florid florets, and her Shakespearean soliloquies in her Comino valley of innocence.

Stevens Han
Professor of Literature, Han Yang University
Seoul, Korea