Water is something we usually take for granted but we cannot do without it. It draws our attention each time it reveals its beauty or its power: when it comes in the form of a river, a lake, the sea, when it embraces us or flares up, when it gives us pleasure or threatens to kill us. Water is transparent and soon slips away, it loses it shape as it falls. In this book by Alessandro Canzian, water becomes the metaphor of the power and the meaning of the smallest and apparently meaningless details that time sweeps away. The poet wants to give water a colour, but this doesn’t imply melting some dye in it: the purpose is to capture its true colour, that only attentive eyes can see.  And he also wants to capture memories, opposing, as Mario Fresa points out in the foreword, “the surfacing of nothing and of the death that at any given moment squashes and presses any event, any gestures, any word emerging”. Poetry about everyday life is scarcely an original theme but it rarely inspires neat and meaningful lines as the ones we find in this book. Being both a poet and a publisher, Alessandro Canzian makes good use of the editing work that he rightly considers as one of the flagships of his publishing house. The editing mainly consists of subtraction, with the aim of removing all that is unnecessary, in order to make the most of each word, of blank spaces, of the graphic design of the lines on the page, with the same accuracy which is needed to reveal the colour of water. Everywhere we can perceive the will to lay down and deposit each word into the reader’s mind. The blank space that in the first section alternates with ink in a well-balanced proportion and in the second and third sections prevails framing lapidary poems is no less important than writing: it marks the time for breathing, the time necessary to savour the stimulations of the five senses, to see the snapshots taken by the poet, to assimilate his thoughts and let our own reflections flow. White washes writing, purifies it and makes it clear, just like water. The line “I love minimal words” is an explicit poetic statement. A great importance is ascribed to the smallest elements, such as insects, nails, shoelaces and the sound made by heels as they step on the ground. Stories are built up lighting up fragments and surprising the reader showing him what has always been before his eyes. In the first two sections about loss, the poet addresses the woman in the second person recalling the gestures, the places, the objects that day after day have made their love and preserve it. In the last section, the lost and missed love is replaced by an imagined woman, anticipated by the initial O in the first group of poems (entitled “Histoire d’O”, where O is pronounced exactly like eau, water). “The girl Olga” is the protagonist of a consistent series of poems that explicitly pays honour to Pagliarani but outlines an absolutely original, open-ended and mysteriously disturbing story. “I imagined it was her coming back from work without having resolved anything about life”: these are the crucial lines around which the details of Olga’s life swirl – lines that also speaks about ourselves. Olga is evoked through sounds coming from upstairs, the sounds of the shower, of hair falling down on her shoulders, of the stockings she throws away, of her screams when she makes love. The silence she leaves in the end is heavy and powerful whereas her smell remains and permeates every space in the building. Like the woman of the previous sections, Olga is a presence that becomes stronger through her absence, in this case through her nonexistence, a presence that the precise and weighty words by Alessandro Canzian endow with a clear consistency and a universal meaning.