The Gods Orbit

Aura Christi is a romantic in classic disguise, reminding one of Hölderlin, Rilke or Emily Dickinson, with a unique approach, at the same time mythical and mystical, to the eternal themes of poetry, giving precedence to the individual's inner and outer exile. While the metonymic postmodern fad is of no interest to her, she favors the hymnal and the solar with tragic twists, with divine praise and self-dissolution clashing, in a language purified of every redundancy, but not lacking in allusive complexity. In The God's Orbit, her most successful collection of poetry, Christi strikes the reader by her seraphic serenity, inspired, as she confesses, by Fra Angelico's mural paintings; hers is the attitude of someone who, after crossing a Dantean bolgia, (a hell's ditch), after vanquishing the monsters of the Inferno, has left the drama of lucidity behind and reached a point in which reality, though still uncontrollable, has no more obscure niches. In naturally flowing lines, full of a sober inner musicality, that support a painful and clear vision of life, the often inimical gods slowly turn into God, the all-pacifying. The book is like a shout to the sky and divinity, forceful, convincing, defying today's society and pointing to where salvation might come from.