The Poetry and Life of Alda Merini

Alda Merini, born in Milan in 1931, published her first poetry collection, La presenza di Orfeo, when she was only twenty-two. By and large, her poetry is characterized by a deep ambiguity. While her early poems are filled with hope and love, her later collections, especially Tu sei Pietro (1962), exhibit a more angst-ridden and troubled Merini. After suffering from mental breakdowns, she intermittently spent time in asylums, especially after the death of her husband in 1986 (O’Brien, 174, 177, 181). Merini’s struggle with her mental illness, her desire for a “normal” life, and her longing to be loved all come to shape her poetry (O’Brien, 177).
One theme that resurfaces in Merini’s writing over and over is the precariousness of life. Overall, Merini’s writing is modest and the “I” is diminished and private. In her poem “Confessione,” published in 1948, for example, she opens: “You always ask me,/ but I don’t live a continuous life;/ I will nourish you with only small instances”) (all translations mine) (Merini, “Confessione,” 1-3). These “instances” are the central theme of the poem, which is only twelve lines long and could be considered only an “an instance” itself. Love and life, the speaker reminds readers, are transient in the face of death. In addition, this poem, published only several years before she began to suffer from mental illness, could also testify to the fact that sanity and “normal life,” for Merini, is also fleeting. The speaker continues: “I am the apparition that disperses/and the time that exists between two moments/ is a truce in death’s favor” (Ibid, 4-5). Within these lines, she wavers in a liminal space between life and death. Yet, her sense of helplessness is interrupted, if only for a second, by a moment of tenderness and love. The speaker continues: “I live in the space of an exchange: you age me without realizing it/ under the heat of your caresses.”
Catherine O’Brien writes of Merini’s work: “[Her] poetry reflects her intention of highlighting her inner self but his effort causes her bitter disillusionment and grief as she waits for someone capable of understanding her” (O’Brien, 180-181). What renders Merini’s work so compelling is that despite her struggle with a mental illness and her proclivity to write about death, she still finds glimmers of hope, which is apparent in several of her poems. When speaking to Catherine O’Brien, she complained: “They ask me often what the asylum is like, but no one asks me about what it’s like to be alive. Life is part of the asylum because it’s in this unholy and abject place that I found life” (Ibid, 185). She, thus, uses poetry and the page as a creative place in which to negotiate and embrace the intense joys, loves, and anguish that define her life.