"Poetry is like water in the depths of the earth. The poet is like a diviner, he finds water even in the driest places and makes it gush forth." This is what Alberto Moravia wrote, and the earth is drier after the death of the poet Giovanni Dettori. Born in Bitti, he was 89 years old. Since 1966, he had lived in Turin, where he directed the Library of the Faculty of Political Science. Reserved, reserved, but always combative. He expressed himself in verse, his favorite form for describing the world, its people, its pain, and the many facets of life. He collaborated with various magazines: Ichnusa, Rinascita sarda, Sardegna oggi, Quaderni Rossi, Quaderni Piacentini, and Thèlema. He wrote "Canto per un Capro," "Amarante," "Lunga ancora la notte," and "A varia luna errando."
In "Song for a Goat," he described a father's grief over the death of his son: "There was a man / in my lineage / and he had lost a son / worthy of being mourned, / the only one of his house. / Yet his grief / was enough to bear, / alone now and childless, / the years that were on the decline, / when hair turns white / and the life already ahead." The actor Mario Faticoni knew Giovanni Dettori well: "Sardinia loses a great poet and a precious man-against." "His voice dissolves the darkness," wrote a journalist when we presented "Tragoidia" in Naples, a production of Il Crogiuolo, the show based on his "Song for a Goat." Bruno Venturi adapted and directed "Tragoidia": "Then I worked as an editor on his "Amarante," a splendid collection of poems, which won the special jury prize at the "Dessì" festival. I remember a wonderful trip back from Villacidro, with Diego Asproni and Tonna, his wife, to Bitti. We had a thousand other occasions where we spoke, saw each other, wrote, and called each other.
In an article a few years ago on the culture page of L'Unione Sarda, written by Luciana Floris, the poet from Bitti explained the essence of his verse works: "Poetry is color, sound, inspiration, rhythm, feeling (but not sentimentality). It is the musicalization of archetypes whose origins and destination I never know. It is a cold eye cast on life and death. But also ear, smell, touch. It is body." Poetry has permeated his life, a vast space for action, loved and cultivated, which has borne significant fruit.
