Perhaps two starting points can be better than a single one.
First starting point: Angelo Di Carlo, Palermitan by birth and Perugian by adoption, trained in philosophy (in Rome, at La Sapienza) and increasingly focused over time on questions bound up with psychotherapy – thanks in part to a long and notable teaching career at the University of Perugia in the Chair of Dynamic Psychology –, is of a psychoanalytic bent and has at last brought a collection of his poetry to print. Tempo della luce e dell'ombra (Morlacchi Editore, Perugia, 2017) is its title – with a Jungian echo, if reality is the ceaseless movement between light and shadow – and it comprises three sections: "Stagioni", "La luce e l'ombra" and "Il dolore e la pietà".
A second possible (and preferable?) starting point: in his very lively Dizionario del diavolo Ambrose Bierce defined the improviser as «a fellow far happier composing poems than are the poor wretches who must listen to him». And in this sense Angelo Di Carlo is really no improviser.
He does not improvise in writing verse in that his words – and the way they interlock, generating meanings and evoking images – are quite plainly the fruit of a long and fortunate settling of lived experience, of sufferings endured and also of wonders and enchantments and joyful visions. So the impression one has, reading his poems, is that they have surfaced only now, yet after a maturing of years; on the other hand this slim volume gathers, in most cases, poems dated by the author to the two thousands, and only a few retrospective forays take us back to 1993-1994, though one senses that traces and ‘sentimental notes’ of even earlier date can be caught, whether or not the author himself is aware of it.
And he is no improviser for another underlying reason as well: it is his own intimate professional ethics, in the sense of a moral duty assumed in Kantian fashion and duly translated into practice, that compels him to a constant work of caring for words. From the psyche to the pen, there and back by way of an inspiration in a certain sense "religious".
It is, in short, within this coming and going between Di Carlo's natural inclination to care for the afflictions of the psyche – both as a psychotherapist and as a trainer in the field of mental health – and the equally natural inclination to care for a kind of thinkability of the feelings, and of pain in particular (see especially p. 69), that these poems find their place.
They also stand as testimony to a genuine dialectic that has truly arisen between two horizons, both belonging to the author: on one side that of the ring of mountains (Perugia, the city where he lives, is not a mountainous place but a hill guarded by mountains, almost elephantine, protected by imposing grown pachyderms), on the other that of the immensity of the sea. If the ring of mountains protects, the vastness of the sea regenerates.
And so, without the one excluding the other, the two horizons take part in Angelo Di Carlo's writing, and therefore, while those mountains draw profiles and then undo them and then return once more to suggest them to the eyes of one who gazes into the distance, that sea «scioglie il dolore», silently bestows caresses and, sly itself, watches the toils of humans.
Here, then, is poetry that becomes a polysemic creation of meanings; here are the ceaseless passages from one season to another, especially between the waning (of the light) of summer and the advance (of the shadows) of autumn; and here too is the overpowering presence of the wind, part Voce dell'universo and part «signore della pace», able to soothe sorrows. Certainly not by magic, but rather by tenacity and by a desire to dwell among the folds of each person's existence. A wind that is itself in some way "religious", or in any case a brother of care.

But between light and shadow, as between the shafts of light and the half shadows, there exists a wedge, disclosed by the alchemical power of poetry, and only thanks to it can we recover – at least within the context of these verses – certain original elements. I will try to single out six of them.
First, time as lived experience and as a memory of affections that carries with it an extreme tenderness; then beauty as empathy with the (life of) nature; alongside it, the earth (and the waters and the trees…) as mystery and gift of peace, and therefore as a spur to searching and a sign of humility and mildness; pain and the listening to it as a challenge and a voice that calls (to us); then again the pity and prayer of human eyes, of those near and those far; finally love that becomes care, precisely, even in daily life.
This last element of love and care, which here we find brought out in particular in the last section of the book, through the image now of a shared meal, now of a reading given, now of the sight of a photograph, has a culmination that corresponds to a line beautiful and laden with many things: «Ciò che era nostro lo hai lasciato a me» (A Serena che non ricorda, p. 76).
And light is also the great metronome of life: it brings down the night, within and without us, until it fills the whole world, while the sun makes it be born each time cloaked in mystery, even though it appears as the most luminous and "clear" of presences, as the lines of Luce remind us (see p. 40).
Not only that: it is once again light, albeit through the natural means of its absence, that decides the empty darkness holding the earth suspended at the moment when, in "religious" silence, it carries on its own bent path (so in Ho veduto la terra, see p. 36).
But for that matter, the wind "dalla voce nuova" that blows in the heart of the poet, straining to scan into the distance among the mountains outlined on the horizon – which are, after all, the "amici segreti" of L'ombra dei monti (p. 54) –, for even a possible hiding place of God, is likewise made of light.
As for the consonances, or rather, we might say, in Capitinian terms, compresences, on rereading Tempo della luce e dell'ombra after some months (which I had had the good fortune to sample in typescript), I have felt three of them. One with the mythological and mystical light that animates a poetry collection of our own time, Indice di meraviglia (1998) by Francesco Pullia. Another with the nocturnal shadows, with their nostalgia generating power, that stir in Capitale del dolore (1926) by a classic such as Paul Éluard, loved – as I discovered afterwards – by Di Carlo. And a third, going even further into the classics, with the eternal permanence of light that is love in the fleeting verses of Sfulingo, the poetic Scintille of Rabindranath Tagore.
In this direction it seems to me that what Victor Hugo maintains of music can be found valid for poetry as well: «it expresses what cannot be said and about which it is impossible to remain silent».
Finally a personal note, on reflection perhaps a little childish: on the margins of this reading, and invitation to reading, I feel I must state which is my favourite poem in this anthology, namely Il fico di Talamone (p. 20), where the fellow protagonists of this sacred tree are the flakes of sea / sun, the luminous whiteness of gentle oleanders, and a west wind that so tastes of an old and precious friendship.

A doctor of research in Philosophy and the Human Sciences (University of Perugia), Giuseppe Moscati chairs the Aldo Capitini Study Centre Foundation of Perugia and is head of the Neohumanist Library of the Cucinelli Foundation of Solomeo (Perugia). An editor of the fortnightly "Rocca", author of numerous essays and volumes, he writes for various newspapers and magazines. Among his most recent volumes: Sandro Penna e Vittorio Bodini. Tracce di una compresenza poetica (Morlacchi, 2010) and R come responsabilità (Cittadella Ed., 2012).