A profound and uninterrupted inner experience embodied in poetic writing that arises from a state of deep nocturnal clarity, and from an isolation from the world's noise that transcends the limits of the body, is what the reader encounters when approaching the poetry collection Forgiving Death, NeP editions, 2026, by Laura Pavia, a poet and writer from Puglia with a degree in Classical Literature from the University of Bari in 1997, and an academic path that has profoundly influenced the formal precision, lyrical sensitivity, and symbolic richness of her literary production.
Her versification is an intimate and instinctive dialogue, a refuge and a tool to provide stability to human identity against the risk of daily disorientation. For Laura Pavia, creating poetry is not a quest for visibility or social approval, but an inner imperative to give meaning to the fragility of our condition: a way to transform human transience — which often makes us evaporate like drops on arid ground — into a source of regeneration. The acceptance of finitude is not, for the author, a surrender, but a path to rebirth and to rediscover the deep courage of existence.
From an existential point of view, the work stands out because it does not merely treat the end of life as an abstract topic, but chooses to immerse itself completely in it, and because it goes beyond the traditional canons of anthologies: there is no room for reassuring distractions or changes in stylistic register, but rather a firm will to remain anchored to a single, dense emotional territory.
Already the title of the work, Forgiving Death, encapsulates a poetic declaration that carries within it a significant and destabilizing paradox, given that, normally, death is perceived as the ultimate antagonist, a biological and emotional injustice to fight against or flee from; the poet, however, associates the verb "forgive" with death, completely reversing the perspective and announcing a precise key to interpretation and a poetry of rare intensity.
Laura Pavia's lyrical voice thus develops from a state of radical awareness, that of someone who refuses to forget their mortal nature, not considering the end as a goal or a metaphor, but as a constant coordinate that shapes the flow of time from within.
Even the panorama of symbols used — evoking natural elements, darkness, and physicality — does not serve an ornamental function, but represents an essential vocabulary structured to resist silence and oblivion; the reader is faced with pages that do not distribute absolute truths, but suggest an attitude: to remain present in the face of pain and embrace it with utmost dignity.
From the first ten poetic texts of the work, it is evident that pain is not experienced by the author as a destructive or deceptive element, but as a generative and orienting force:

"...Pain does not deceive a life,
it travels by meeting you.
And you make it a prayer and shelter
in the unraveling of the air:
it is worth a destiny and moves men.
It is a different path
that does not betray until hope,
until the comfort of silence
in the land of time and quiet." (p. 11)

The stylistic and conceptual essence of the various poetic texts lies in this dialectic between the immanence of the everyday and the absoluteness of the end, so much so that living is described as a "precarious existence every day in time," an ethical struggle ("the commitment to oneself of a just continuation") that nevertheless finds redemption "in the unexpected that amazes," whether it be the tolling of a bell or the "silent brightness of the moon." Yet, the specter of the end remains a spatial and psychological constant; death is vividly defined as "a place with no exit [...], a pain of time," a resentment that creeps in like "a shadow gathered in the veins, / lost in the dust of wear / of too many words without a where." The predominant landscape is that of the desert and the night, literary tropes of radical stripping. Traversing this desolate land, the author experiences the split between the logos and the flesh ("the sky becomes earth and words have no bodies"), in a context where pain "neither rests nor measures lives." Laura Pavia's poetry thus becomes an act of resistance and memory, and the poetess asks for the time of a night and a minimal tool to perform a rite of secular resurrection: "... On my knees, I pray to the shadows to be a dream in the days and in the years I do not yet know. Give me a pen, the time of a night will suffice to write the stars on the bones of the fallen and they will have memory again in a moment that endures as much as infinity in a verse." p. 16. The female lyrical self confronts her own vulnerability ("if I had armor on my chest / I would not tremble looking at life") and recognizes herself in the genealogy of the exiled of song: "Exiled daughter of Sappho, gently cradle a voice [...] melt the snow to reclaim the earth," while the night, initially threatening, transforms into a welcoming womb. Even when time "pretends the shadows are real" and nothingness advances, making existence tremble, the act of inner gathering becomes the barrier to annihilation: "I embrace myself / while nothingness trembles around / ceasing and I hold myself as if not to disappear." In a second set of compositions from *Forgiving Death*, Laura Pavia deepens and radicalizes her existential inquiry. The lack of a title for each text is not a graphic detail but a precise poetic choice: the poems are configured as a single, uninterrupted stream of consciousness, fragments of a soul's diary that refuses categorization; the absence of titles removes protective barriers, forcing the reader to enter a lyrical continuum where the themes of finitude, word-shield, and reconciliation blend seamlessly. The macro-themes that emerge from the lyrics are articulated along various fundamental directions. **The weight of existence and cohabitation with death**

In this volume, death is not a future event but a daily, almost domestic presence with which the lyrical self of the author dialogues and coexists. There is an acceptance of a radical fragility, describing humanity as "dust between the lines", suspended "on the surface of a nothingness that penetrates by emptying".
Facing the void, Laura Pavia's poetry takes on a testimonial and, at the same time, painful function. The poet writes that "behind the dead / poetry has the patience of a torment", a painful gestation that serves to fill "that silence that still awaits a song", almost suggesting that poets are those who carve the stone and history, but they are also tragic figures, whose verses are born from nothing: "the void has the hands of poets / that stain the conscience of death". Writing thus becomes the only tool to stem the decay, the only trace destined to remain when even names are lost in the water.

Nature: the moon, the wind, the sea

The cosmic and natural landscape actively participates in the human drama. The moon and stars do not offer romantic consolation but a bare quiet. Looking at the sky, the author finds an escape from anguish:

"I am in watching myself while slowly
night falls in the evening and I breathe the silence of the stars.
This is the infinite that pales
death, keeping the breath in the air.", p. 32.

The wind becomes corporeal ("the wind has a body tonight") to support "the precariousness of human substance", while the sea is entrusted with a cathartic and destructive task, that of a liberating invocation. Laura Pavia seems to suggest that to "forgive death" one must first fully traverse their own inner winter, and poetry then offers itself as that "narrow door that breaks the darkness", a deep breath capable of allowing man to breathe even on the edges of nothingness. Her poetry shows a marked thematic and stylistic coherence, moving in the vein of a twilight tone strongly linked to the reworking of trauma—whether historical (war) or personal (grief, illness, loss).
What emerges from the texts is a dialectic between night, moon, and silence; if the night is not simply a chronological fact but the geometric and existential space in which reflection takes place, the moon, a key figure, assumes an ambivalent value: a mute witness, an almost organic element that participates in decay, but also the only source of light and hope; the moon loses its classic romantic aura to become painful or indifferent, so much so that the author writes "The moon rots in the thought that dies" and, in another dramatic passage, evokes "a prayer [that] crowns the moon petrified in a gesture".

The wounded memory

A deep thread of the collection also delves into family roots, where the trauma of the Second World War reverberates on subsequent generations, stealing childhood and breaking the lines of emotional succession. In the composition dedicated to Giuseppina, memory fights against the oblivion of illness or old age:

“…The affection of memory is missing when you are on the other side, ‘who are you?’ and then you return and again questions that wander back and forth while I lose you in time. And then, ‘how much has gone!’ and you smile, with that smile that speaks of pain and absence and dense terror. Giuseppina, my Giuseppina: the knowledge of life that gnaws at the bones and takes away even in wakefulness. You remain, though in moments, a beacon of another life, more true, real substance of being an aunt, grandmother, and mother and never a daughter, because the war takes away everything, and childhood.”, p. 41. Even the paternal figure is marked by struggle and history: “I’m afraid, dad, of not seeing you anymore, of not feeling the strength of time on your hands burned by toil, of a gaze that carried the war with it,” while memory becomes an anthropomorphic landscape. The experience of trauma and the fragmentation of the Self.

Physical and existential pain is described through images of fragmentation: bones, thorns, ashes, trenches. The poetess transfigures the wounded body where suffering penetrates the tissues, becoming skeletal: “It enters the bones light and sharp / that peace that comes from memory” and again “I am a stone that water marks without return, / a thread of thorns ties me to the earth”; she also experiences dissociation from herself in the face of the absolute: “I met myself outside of myself when the sky returned behind the stars”, defining herself in another text as “a broken music, at the edge of men”.
If death and pain are pervasive, water (in the form of rain) assumes the role of a purifying and resolving element. It is through the rain that the design of the title is fulfilled: the acceptance of finitude: “It rains to wash a life, / it rains to wash a war, / it rains to forgive death.” The rain levels the torments, silences the weapons of the past, and grants a truce to the daily hell. Forgiveness does not erase mourning, but transforms it into a habitable space, allowing time to flow again: “I will go away more and more / and then finally you will forgive death”.
Laura Pavia's stylistic hallmark relies on free verse, with a syncopated rhythm, often fragmented by enjambments that mimic the breathlessness or sobbing (“leaving that nothing that sobs / going back”). The key terms (moon, death, silence, pain, bones, shadow) return obsessively, almost combinatorially, creating a resonant structure.
In the final analysis, Forgiving Death emerges as a work of rare ethical and expressive density, a poetic journey where the poetic word does not merely record pain but takes on the burden of its radical transfiguration. Through rigorous writing, refined by classical studies and stripped of any rhetorical complacency, Laura Pavia performs an act of exceptional literary and existential courage: inhabiting finitude not to surrender to nothingness, but to wrest from it fragments of meaning and indestructible dignity.
Her fractured and syncopated versification thus becomes a reflection of the soul, where the cracks of lived experience, the wounds of  family and collective history and the purifying embrace of nature are recomposed into a universal design. Laura Pavia's work is certainly not a consolatory song, but rather a rigorous invitation to remain vigilant and present in the face of life's winter, to trace “stars on the bones of the fallen” and to recognize in poetry the last, strenuous bulwark against oblivion. A necessary work, transforming the anguish of limits into the most firm and heartfelt prayer for human permanence:

I left a thought elsewhere.
We are on a long road where
silence has no words,
and stairs open stairs
and no window in that place
that hides the cracks after death:
it is the perfection of pain
that even pierces the walls.
And the moon:
she watches as stones watch,
while silence stitches
until granting quiet within., p. 76

source: https://www.radiortm.it/