ABSTRACT
To simplify matters, we could picture the man and the woman in the outside world, in public, perhaps in the subway, though those 'subterranean mists of lines' might also hover in some other underground realm and the 'overpowering voices' emanate from Dantesque apparitions or even represent dread articulated within the poet himself. Such is the studied multiplicity of Alfredo de Palchi's imagery, especially in his recent work. 'Penetrate' is a sexually connoted verb, yet it is used here in an incorporeal context because mental images are immaterial, at least for de Palchi's symbolic purposes. De Palchi provides a few pieces of a larger narrative puzzle that we can put together as we wish. He is a lyric poet, not a storyteller. These amorous correlatives of spontaneity and hindrance, distance and union, difference and sameness, possibility and impossibility, liberation and confinement, follow no set ground rules and display no strict dialectics.
