Sunny Days and Sleepless Nights

Sunny Days & Sleepless Nights

PUBLISHED BY: Idea Graphics LLC

IMPRINT: Idea Press
PUBLISHING DATE: December 2016
ISBN# 978-0-9721243-8-6
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS # 201658356
PAPERBACK: PAGE COUNT 180
LANGUAGE: English, Italian
DIMENSION: 6″x9″
PRICE: $12.95

Tiziano Thomas Dossena’s collection of award-winning selected poetry is titled “Sunny Days and Sleepless Night,” a phrase that any poet past life’s midpoint (Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita) and glancing backwards might ruefully utter, surprised to find a foundation of work indisputably present on the page as robust, poignant, and hard-earned as any “real” life he lived.

Dossena’s verse sets a bar for openness, frankness, and vulnerability few lives could ever match. In his work, the surprise of his “confessional life” is the one lived off the page, refracted through decades of his sorrowful, pensive, but vivid lines.

The solemnities of art can be, in Dossena’s writing, undermined by emotional exhaustion:

“Bittersweet memories / Erase all the powerful thoughts / Leaving a proven soul / Sighing in an exhausted body,” he writes in “Forgotten.”

The passage somewhat echoes the familiar opening of Dante’s “Inferno” — where the narrator says that he does not remember how he lost his way, but he has wandered into a fearful place, a dark and tangled valley.

It is deeply characteristic of him that the most despairing moments are also his most revelational, renewing his own equanimity along with the reader’s.

Dossena’s work has always been uncompromisingly frontal, a face-forward presentation of himself, simultaneously scrutinizing and vulnerable, writing that often contains the mutual reliance of spontaneity, confession, and calculation.

Many of his poems are chronicles of various barriers first anxiously feared but then crossed, and of the spiritual, physical, and sensual pleasures and pains that would inevitably follow. His realities on the page are a series of crossed thresholds as a lover, a friend, a father, a Roman Catholic. And his verses, so often about the ups and downs of having a keen sensitivity and an emotional depth, are themselves bodies, “anatomies” formed in the aftermath of transformation and transcendence.

Linda Ann Lo Schiavo

Review appeared on Bridge Puglia USA, September 2017

Sunny Days & Sleepless Nights, by Tiziano Thomas Dossena, published by Ideapress, is a delightful collection of bilingual poetry split into two parts, the first part consisting of four sections.

It must be said that Dossena’s poetry is founded on the humanity of the poet, with lines enlivened by the delicate presence of the female. Love is sung, desired and perhaps brought about and meant as the permanent yeast of the cosmos, and offers to the reader a lively play of light and shade: Now I yearn for the light/ aware of my incapacity/ of making you understand/ my need of you,/ but the light never appears/ to a blind man/ if not in his fantasy… And again: Now it’s a sunny day/ and I feel different./ I know this will be/ my last voyage and I am afraid…

Right from the first lines, in Sunny days, the poet highlights his familiarity with poetic codes, since “first of all poetry, if it is such, seduces by means of the music of its words”, as Ungaretti said. And it is from this starting-point that Dossena’s poetic expression makes his claim to the ways of the heart and the poetic validity of the feeling that we find throughout the work, from the first line to the last.

The division into sections corresponding to the various nuances of love and light is clear in this compilation, which takes us through the shadows that life inevitably casts on us. Love, therefore, as a feeling bound to life, the light of life and of the desire of a harmonious presence in the universe. Likewise, the other face of love, pain, is not lacking. It is, indeed, the essential shadow that completes life. But it is memory, the treasure chest of the soul, as Aristotele said, that redeems the poet from dreams: One, one hundred farewells/ have no cancelled/ your image…”, recites our Author. Or “Give me your hand,/ close your eyes and dream:/ until tomorrow/ only dreams/ can sustain you.

Only by listening to ourselves can we enter that place where it is possible to grasp the mystery of life and the consoling faculty of memory. The sense of a bygone world is evident in the collection, but also of a newfound one, in which tenderness, doubt and love are strong and recurring emotions that offer the reader concrete and defined images.

As psychologist Aldo Carotenuto affirms, we mustn’t be afraid of our emotions, because life itself is made of emotions. Rationality defines the limits of our actions but cannot put a brake on the emotions of our inner world for which poetry is the spokesperson.

The oxymoron play of light and shade, where shade is as important as light, as a distinctive feature of the human condition, concludes with the second section “Sleepless nights”, which completes the title of the collection. The poet ends this section with The mirror, a metaphor with which he synthesizes his vision of life and where light and shade, the past and the future meld with the luminosity of poetry.

The lovely illustrations of the young artist Francesca Malara, interpret the poetic thought, and complete the work validly.

Giulia Poli Disanto

Recensione di Marina Agostinacchio, 17 febbraio 2017

Devo ringraziare Tiziano Thomas Dossena per avermi fatto conoscere la sua poesia. Il libro Sunny Days & Sleepless Nights mi “entra”, per usare un’espressione efficace, in modo diretto e immediato. La magia risiede nella capacità del poeta di farci accorgere che la vita, quella di tutti i giorni, la nostra vita, risiede nel non visibile, o meglio in ciò di cui non ci accorgiamo. Parlare di oggetti, persone, sentimenti, amarezze, felicità, dolore e delusione… – ecco, mischio tutto in una scatola, e in modo disordinato, perché questa è la vita – è un atto dovuto, sembra volerci suggerire l’autore, se non altro per il fatto di essere i protagonisti della scena terrena, di accettare il patto col creatore: esserci, a condizione di cogliere nella claudicanza il dinamismo, la poliedricità, l’anelito di perfettibilità.

Le quattro sezioni in cui è suddiviso questo libro prendono avvio da Amore Tormentato, quasi a suggerire nell’andamento circolare l’ultimo segmento dal titolo L’Angoscia Dell’Esistenza. E a pensarci bene, Amore è esistenza e per questo sofferenza che si irradia in un attraversamento da un qui a un oltre, ponendo interrogativi .

“ Esistere, respirare/ accorgersi d’essere/ chi ero e chi sarò/ per un periodo indeterminato/ in ambedue le direzioni temporali/… (Polvere di stelle) Amore che nella sua accezione più totalizzante, come dice il poeta, in La Fede , nella prima sezione, crede di essere per sempre “… Ero riuscito a credere/che fossimo tutt’uno… “ , o come nella poesia L’Ombra, “…. Poi l’ombra ritorna/ e già moriamo, pensando a un domani,/ vicino o lontano,/nel quale,/ mirando le stelle,/ non si potrà stringer/ l’altrui mano/…” Ma l’Amore si declina in modi diversi, a seconda dei destinatari. Così in L’Amore Nella Sua Semplicità appaiono dediche a nomi di donna tra cui la madre. Quello che interessa è potere intuire una linea che fluisce e si dispiega in momenti della vita che lasciano un segno tra dolore, gratitudine, rimpianto, trasformazione nel tempo, tenerezza. Lo sguardo del poeta (Osservazioni Sulla Vita ne è testimonianza) sembra volere riprendere, quasi come una macchina da presa di un regista attento, soffermarsi su uomini e situazioni, su elementi della natura, a suggerirci l’idea che tutto, proprio tutto debba essere elevato a dignità dalla scrittura, che non esista scarto, buccia, scoria in questo palcoscenico terreno.

Dossena dà prova in questo libro di maturità; è Ulisse che ha navigato per mari, mai stanco. Ulisse capace di gustare la vita, di accettarne i limiti, di avere sete di conoscenza dell’agire umano, per potersi “leggere” con sapienza, varcare i confini, le colonne d’Ercole, senza precipitare nell’abisso. Chi scrive è architetto di un progetto che senza dubbio mira alla composizione di un arazzo i cui pezzi si muovono, pur nella loro staticità grafica. Tiziano Dossena sa comporre ed è dotato di una mente illuminata e di un’anima appassionata.