thumb|alt=The poet circa 1950Helle Busacca (pronounced as /it/;[1] San Piero Patti, 21 December 1915 – Florence, 15 January 1996) was an Italian poet, painter, and writer.
Born in a well-to-do family in San Piero Patti, Province of Messina, Sicily, Helle Busacca lived for part of her youth in her birthplace. Then she moved to Bergamo and later to Milan together with her parents. She graduated with a degree in classical letters at the Royal University of Milan. In the following years, she taught letters in various high schools, moving from city to city: Varese, Pavia, Milan, Naples, Siena, and finally Florence, where she died on 15 January 1996.
Her papers, which include correspondence, sketches, and rough drafts of published works, as well as many unpublished manuscripts, are kept in a special collection at the State Archives of Florence.
In December 2015, at a conference on the centenary of her birth, the Municipal Library of San Piero Patti was named for her.
Busacca's papers, which include correspondence, sketches, and rough drafts of published works, as well as many unpublished manuscripts, are kept in a special collection at the State Archives of Florence.
Her work, especially her poetry and story writing, shows a profound originality and incisiveness that often departs from the intense testimony of a personal drama and from the consciousness of a tragic destiny. The author Busacca, nourished by a deep knowledge of classicism, forms a relationship with and is influenced by modern poetry of the most diverse origins and cultures, but with particular predilection for that of American background. In her works appear hints of the Beat Generation, Eliot, and Pound. Next to such influences, her work is marked by fluid variations of register that move from crude verbal violence to pinnacles of abstract and serene lyricism. A personally sorrowful but poetically fruitful note is the tragic memory of her brother Aldo's suicide, from which Busacca takes off to reach the sublime heights of a "message to the stars" and, almost paradoxically, to the concrete contemporaneity of an "act of social faith."
In "I quanti suicidio" (1972), the poet invents a language of the spoken word that is simple and immediate, meant for everyone to understand, as an indictment of the Italian system, the cowardice in her country that permitted the suicide of her brother, an unemployed scientist. The language she used, in its fiery directness and immediacy, was completely alienated from the experimental, skeptical, or symbolic language used in the poetry of her contemporaries.[3]
Giorgio Linguaglossa writes:[4]
Carlo Betocchi, Eugenio Montale, Raffaele Crovi, Giuseppe Zagarrio, Mario Grasso, Domenico Cara, Donato Valli, Gilda Musa, Bortolo Pento, Carlo Bo, Luciano Anceschi, Claudio Marabini, Oreste Macrì, Marco Marchi, Maurizio Cucchi, Gabriella Maleti, Mario Luzi, Alberico Sala, Sergio Solmi, Luigi Testaferrata, Vittorio Sereni, Marcello Venturi, Leonardo Sinisgalli, and Giorgio Linguaglossa, among others, have written about her.
The Alessandra Contini Bonacossi Archive for Women's Memory and Writing has curated the collecting, organizing, and storing of her papers at the State Archives of Florence.[5]