The Language of Belonging in Pasquale Verdicchio’s This Nothing’s Place

Abstract

The aim of this essay is to carry out a stylistic analysis of the language used in a choice of the poems included in the collection This Nothing’s Place by Pasquale Verdicchio, paying particular attention to instances of memory and space, which strongly contribute to a re-definition of the poet’s identity through a sense of belonging. The language connected with the idea of space is foregrounded by stylistic devices such as internal deviation, repetition of lexemes and parallelism of structure. Verdicchio, as a migrant, questions the issue of identity by discovering a place of belonging in a space of spaceless and timeless memory and imagination. The geographies and maps his poems hint at are not only related to physical places but to spaces of emotion, which intertwine in a dimension of fluidity.