gillian harding-russell
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Morning After You
By Carmelo Militano
Ekstasis Editions (2014)
ISBN 978-177-10343

Carmelo Militano writes from the perspective of an immigrant to Canada from Calabria, Italy whose landscape shares some similarities to the prairies in summer but provides more of a contrast in winter. As well as the freshness inherent in being a foreigner, Militano’s eye for detail and his imagist approach work together with a fondness for unexpected angles and surrealistic effects. Frequent allusions to English literature combined with homely images from his native Calabria weave irony and a layer of suggestion, and lend sophistication and a European homeliness to classical effect. Whereas in“ The Atlas” Militano uses a metaphysical conceit in the manner of Donne’s iconic image in “The Compass,” in “Bus stop, Main and Logan,” the poet builds the poem on an allusion to Ezra Pound’s “In a station of the metro.” Meanwhile, in “Winnipeg Noir,” a piling and patchwork of literary allusions is reminiscent of T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” Altogether there is a natural grace and energy to Militano’s writing while his experience builds on the tensions between his homeland with its weight of cultural history and the modern Winnipeg setting with its anonymous grey streets, between literary /classical traditions and a contemporary popular culture of poet societies in which the poet-speaker complains about “this ceaseless habit / of writing on shadows in the middle of the afternoon” (82). Humour and elegance and archness in the poet’s style and tone draw the reader in even as one detects a certain self-irony.

Reminding me of the scene with the rescue of the nun on the bridge in Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, Carmelo, in the opening poem, “Finding 17^th Century Poetry on the Window Sill at the end of August in Italy” juxtaposes the sacred and profane and the historic and the contemporary. From the cool breeze that “swells the curtain of nine months,” with that image’s association with the gestation of pregnancy, the following lines liken the house to a “convent”:

white washed walls, with narrow black cross above the headboard
plain wooden chair turned away from the table
open closet door on an angle like the lid of a coffin (11)

Here raw juxtapositions and paradox are smoothed into long lines that flow with an unexpected mellifluousness, and the poem ends on the turn of yet another surprise association. While the female figure in the poem identified as “you” is pictured reading Marvel’s “To a Coy Mistress,” she turns away from the sun’s “winged chariot” to reveal her “full breasts / away from the modest Calabrian sun.” There is a naughtiness and a playfulness amid the erudition that entices the reader with intricacies of conflicting impression that have a net-effect of strengthening each others’ ironies.

While reading the erotic “The Atlas” with its central metaphor of maps, I was reminded of Donne’s “The Compass” in which the poem hinges on a single point of similarity between the compass and the always returning ‘faithful’ lover. Accordingly, in the Atlas, the map metaphor is extended and developed in ingenious ways:

just before the bells on a camel caravan ring
to cross the flat desert of your belly
pause to smell salt
near your original connection to the sea
register a promise
to your solitary prisoner on the embankment
who now waves and stiffens
above your dew filled valley (22)

Militano has a talent for erotic poetry, and this dramatization of the lovemaking is poignant through the freshness of his images. In droll romantic denouement, the speaker urges “the moon, stars, sun to return / send light back into the universe” while in “in a single, fitful blast simulating orgasm all the maps born under (the lover’s) skin” must be redrawn (Ibid.).
That the poet-speaker finds himself caught in a northern hemisphere where the skies are wintery and grey becomes most poignant in “November.” Here images drawn from Italy and the old world have the effect of accentuating the differences between Winnipeg in November and Calabria during its extended period of seasonal mildness. In these lines an implied old woman image captures the natural setting and humanizes it in an old-world way:

Low mud green rivers under the city bridges
move slow as swollen legs
ice thin and clean as a silk scarf
sits on the edge of the riverbanks (64)

I imagine Ceres become an old crone as transported to winter and another hemisphere while biding her time until her daughter, Proserpina, may return to her for a visit in the spring.
In the closing lines, the poet is impelled to “undress the evening “with the invasion of a thousand sighs” and he feels a detached association with the moon pictured with “a fat crooked smile” that reminds this reader of Hades in his craven and slightly disturbing marriage to Proserpina after taking advantage of her having eaten three seeds of a pomegranate (Ibid.).
Unlike “November” in which the poet makes contrasts between the current and remembered setting, in the summer poem “Light and Sky in Winnipeg” the poet discovers surprising similarities between Winnipeg and his memory of Calabria which might even convince the reader that he has come to welcome his new home, at least during the summer.

my tomatoes are plump and green
pagan sunflowers worship every day
and beans scale the mesh fence
like ancient Roman soldiers (52)

In these lines, Militano brings alive the current setting by allowing his Italian experience to influence and add resonance to our seeing what may otherwise be too familiar and taken for granted. As do the romantic and classical poets, Militano uses personification (usually considered too formal contemporary poetry) that comes naturally to him and does not feel imposed in reference to this western Canadian city as seen through Mediterranean eyes.                            In “Winnipeg Noir,” carrying the subtitle “suite of poems at the intersection of who we were and who we are,” Militano similarly brings together classical and contemporary allusions.
The Latin phrase “pulchritudinous night” may to our modern ears sound closer to ‘putrid” than beautiful,’ and what follows suggests how this speaker’s disenchanted romantic view may have been converted to one who now discovers pleasure in the city’s salacious or ordinary fare. The following anaphora beginning with ‘the city’ combines a choral effect (characteristic of Greek drama) with something like modern rap (as Militano would read the poem aloud in a coffee shop):

City where the streets are shiny with pools of wet light
City where a cat slips under the fence at midnight
City of broken streets, big box stores and broken houses
beside the red-wheel barrow Williams insisted we see for the first time
City where you find yourself and lose yourself over and over again (76)

“What remains” for this disillusioned but somehow invigorated speaker is the “Holy Trinity of   coffee, fries and burgers, hissing like/lovers” (Ibid).
Here is a poetry collection that juxtaposes classical and modern traditions as returning to the poet-speaker’s homeland of Calabria, Italy as well as offering a unique immigrant slant on the city of Winnipeg itself.

The post Book review of “Morning After You” by Carmelo Militano appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

gillian harding-russell

In Verge, Monahan writes slender verses that carry a MacEwenesque self-discovery and wisdom. Just as MacEwen associated with ‘magic animals’ and talismans as an extension of her Jungian-conceived consciousness, so Monahan identifies with the fox figure in a series of “verges” or prayers that run through the collection. The term “verge” indicates some brink of discovery through pain—as on the verge of tears—or experience, which Monahan often conceives as a physical landscape. Interspersed with these verges, Monahan writes about family members in terse verses where small details evoke whole lives.
Although these intermittent prayers dubbed “verges” supply the title for the poetry collection as a whole, the word “verge” appears in “verge 8,” which I will call the ‘title verge’ for this reason. Here the poetic phrasing once again recalls MacEwen’s finely chiselled, sparse verses:

I am on the verge
of some understanding
some thing I am meant to know

(102)

“Dark Pines under Water” with its Jungian depths of consciousness comes to mind. Rather than using the landscape as analogue and psychological metaphor, Monahan reflects her delight in the nimble and alert creature of the fox itself: “I dream of the small hello / of your ears / pricked and listening” (102).
In spite of a mystical tendency in which the speaker identifies with the fox figure throughout these ‘verges,’ Monahan can be down to earth. In the poem “my mother’s name was Nancy,” the speaker describes her mother as a young woman who “pinched her cheeks / to give them colour” and “met a young French man / who broke her heart” (16).

Later she married dad in a long satin gown
fifty tiny buttons down her back.

(16)

Monahan’s interest (tinged with amusement?) in the number of buttons at the back of her mother’s dress adds a no-nonsense human quality to the poem that contrasts with the more elusive voice in the verges. In that parallel thematic series, the poet is seen to follow her poetic-of-the-artist-as-vessel for inspiration, as expressed in the poem “not I”:

it’s the fire woman
who turns and turns
in the shiver of silver flames
words sparking from her mouth.

(62)

Here the “fire woman’ who “turns and turns” at once evokes MacEwen’s dance and echoes Yeats’ similar application of the image.
Not only does Monahan have a minute and particular musical sense that is heard inside and at the edges of her verses, but also a humanity that is warm without sentimentality. The ending in the poem about the speaker’s mother “my mother’s name was Nancy” ends with the portrait of a woman of strong character who does not give up, causing her husband displeasure while she repairs the eaves when dying of cancer:

She stayed home as long as she could
showing me how to make seven layer dinner
when to add the fabric softener
two weeks before Christmas
in the middle of the night

(18)

The poem’s ending, with the doctor’s reported words, is moving: “Nancy it’s time we took you to the hospital now…” To which her mother “after hesitation” replies “yes.”
Similarly, the poem dedicated to the speaker’s father, “dad’s angel” shares this hard-headed quality. Monahan begins the poem matter-of-factly: “No Billy Graham angel / all glory and grace,” her father is not without flaws. In fact, he keeps playboy magazines under the bed, drinks beer with his buddies, and “loved the heft of a good gun.” Monahan builds up to the poem’s ending with a storyteller’s grace and gentle irony, stating that her father’s angel didn’t hold her father in his arms or smile a “beatific smile”:

Dad’s angel just showed up
said c’mon Bill, let’s go.

(32)

Contrasting with the more cultured elements in the verges with their nature imagery and the fox image, there is this no-nonsense human quality to the family poems that have a folksy quality.
Monahan, who is writer-in-residence for the wards Victoria Hospital in Prince Albert and facilitates the Writing For Your Life group with the Canadian Mental Health Association is a strong advocate for individuals with psychological afflictions. That her experience may be firsthand is suggested in the poem “there was a time.” The speaker recounts, “I was a thin walking stick of pain,” and likens her experience to that of an “insect” “wearing my exoskeleton / living on lettuce leaves.” That she skips two or three days eating and “the lighter I became / the less weighted I felt” tells us the speaker is afflicted with a form of anorexia:

food pulled me down
into the overfull lap
of my father and grandmother
fat with disapproval

(34)

The appeal of this new state of being as a “will-o-the-wisp-woman” or “a magic wand” becomes clear as the speaker expresses the desire to “tap three times” and make herself disappear. There is a mystical suggestion in this poem that, while about family, seems to have more in common with the more introspective verges.
Perhaps the most moving poem about family comes in the long poem about the speaker’s sister who suffers a stroke (“the word for every thing”). In an amusing dramatic tableau, the speaker teaches her sister words that she has lost, and in her sister’s fumbling calls her “the poet.”

the coyote in the field is papaya
slippery ice is itchy
            my slip on shoes are coupons

(95)

The mistaken words do indeed have the freshness of malapropism that make the speaker see the world anew, but her sister’s response is that she is still the poet: “no she says and hugs me you” (95).
In the final poem “verge 10,” the fox reappears as a figure of redemption that in identification with the woman “waits in the forest’s calm palm”: “I want to be / like you   unhurried and graceful / accepting of what comes next” (118).
Here is an elegant collection held together lyrically with the fox running through the forest, and the speaker divided between her introverted and extroverted selves as she celebrates life in its beauty amid family losses while also striving to come to terms with herself.

The post Book review of “Verge” by Lynda Monahan appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.