If “Otto Betulle” were a dish it would definitely be something bittersweet. It is in fact a collection of sonnets, calembour, aphorisms and poems that have the sweet taste of irony but also the sour aftertaste of melancholy.
It is a fast book full of situations that lies on the border between the real and the dream between hilarity and emotion.
The author wants to arouse two opposing reactions: a smile with clenched teeth and a bitter taste in the mouth in the belief that smiling is the most rational way of dealing with reality and that writing what, apparently, are frivolities, when everyone gives a tone, is today the only way to demonstrate their freedom and independence of thought.
Poems of “melancholy latent in the happiest moments” as sings Sergio Caputo; in which you feel the need to write to communicate to know each other to understand. And I hope that Clare never fails in this need, which is an inseparable part of her being of her soul.
Poems of awareness that never turn into attitudes of surrender or feelings of defeat, but that become an incentive to seek relationships and relationships to approach others while knowing that the road is difficult and complicated, full of obstacles and pitfalls capable of generating moments of melancholy.
The speed of the text contrasts with the desire to linger and reread to discover that behind each page often hides the love for life and just as often criticizes our society or rather to the customs of today.

Claudio Ardigò