Bartolo Cattafi's poetry is a significant testimony to the return of a baroque style in twentieth-century literature. The important presence of Cattafi's work in the evolution of Italian poetry during the last two decades is also due to his gradual refusal of the hermetic tradition and to his new usage of poetic language. Like the English Metaphysicals, Cattafi tries to grasp the fragments of an unseizable reality by exploring verbal logic to the verge of absurdity. He bestows a metaphysical significance upon common physical objects; existential interrogations mold the ethical and aesthetic import of his poems. The metaphorical use of words creates the symbolic transposition of emotional phenomena into objects. By using literary emblems, Cattafi, like the Metaphysicals, conveys a concept figuratively, so that it can be perceived by the mind and by the senses simultaneously. He combines separate and distant experiences into what T. S. Eliot defines...