I have said it before. There is a special place in literary citizenship heaven for publishers that produce bi-lingual editions of poetry. I know just a little Italian, and so am less qualified than I would like when it comes to discussing Milo De Angelis’ Theme of Farewell and Afterpoems. Still, a review should be welcomed. The book is strong, impeccable, heartbreaking and heartening. Read these poems aloud in both languages, to allow the sounds and rhythms to enter your body and become part of your ongoing song in ways that are impossible to articulate completely, yet are compelling and life-enhancing.
De Angelis is the author of eight collections of poetry, two collections of essays and has translated many other European writers. He is revered in his native Italy. Susan Stewart, who teaches at Princeton, has written a graceful introduction, making this volume a perfect package, especially when considering the handsome cover. The top half of the front flap is a reproduction of an industrial cityscape painted by Mario Sironi in 1945, just after World War Two, and six years before De Angelis was born. In the foreground, a lone bicyclist makes his way, a fitting, if not subtle stand-in for the author. Good poetry always deserves this kind of appropriate quality, and the task is made increasingly urgent as shelf space in bookstores becomes more difficult than ever to come by.
When one knows and loves words as much as De Angelis and his translators surely do, spirit and intellect rebel at wasting even a syllable. His poems are both compact and elastic because his skill provides so much room to breathe. His creative life has been deeply affected by the death of his wife-from cancer- ten years ago, and by the prisoners he has taught for decades. So it is not surprising to find him immersed in issues of free will, confinement and loss.
“Thus one way to think of the economy of value in De Angelis’ poems is to consider that they express a life exactly counter to a life imprisoned.” This is from Stewart’s introduction, and it is with a feeling of acuteness that I use it to preface my declaration that it is time for the lyrics themselves. I begin with the Italian, to emphasize De Angelis’ original intent.
III. TROVARE LA VENA
Cresce l’ansia nei bicchieri
dal tuo turbine segreto alla luce
verde del raparto , ai corridoi,
al vetro sbarrato, all’addio
con le ciglia asciutte , questa morte
che non ha piu tempo.
**
E follia di tutti, l’estate, traffic
di cantieri, nella citta lasciata. Ognuno
e lo stadio terminale, ognuno e le state, questa
estate vissuta in una sillaba, in un tremito
della sostanza, in una scala mobile,
in uno filo di mani. Ogumuno chiede dov ‘e
la verna, presto, la vena.
TO FIND THE VEIN
The anxiety in the drinking glasses grows
out of your secret whirl to the ward’s
green light, to the corridors,
to the glass partition, to the farewell
with dry eyelashes, this death
that no longer has any time.
**
It’s everybody’s crack-up, the summer, the construction sites’
traffic in the city left behind. Everyone
is terminal stage, everyone is summer, this
summer spent in one syllable, in a tremor
of substance, in an escalator,
in a thread of hands. Everyone is asking where the vein
is, hurry up, the vein.
“Vein” a wonderfully short word containing multitudes, human and mineral. De Angelis uses it with the implicit resonance one comes to expect in his work. He’s involved in a long, complicated and compelling process here, literally and figuratively, and the poem goes on for ten pages, with two stanzas on each page. By the end, when he announces that “the vein cannot be found, my god, cannot be found,” one is reeling from the particulars and the expanse of a grief whose vein will never be completely mined.
De Angelis is a master of the snapshot, as in “A Dark Thirst,” with its straightforward declarations and dozens of instances that suggest frames and boundaries, some unbroken, some shattered:
They don’t respond to the roll call, they are
scattered to the borders of the earth, they possess
the secret of the trembling line, they came out
of the veins of the beloved and now
you can see them, in the evening, toward the ring roads
calling for silence with a finger at their lips.
Non respondono all’appelllo, sono is the shorter, more melodic version of the first line in Italian . Compactness is a discipline, a virtue, especially in an era like ours in which the intrusiveness of the blogosphere/chattersphere, and the sloppy effusion that dominates the thinking and the writing in it, can bring about a kind of paralysis. De Angelis is an excellent antidote to this, by the consistency of his example.
“A Dark Thirst” contains many lines that please while engaging with hard truths, and the following stanza is a case in point:
In transit between the housing projects
the same destined shape
winds through his fingers and makes them his,…
the thermometer’s mercury descends, everything
resumes its chaos,
the mouth closes
at the point of speech, the eyes open
in the face of the diver with her broken skull….
Again, most of the lines are shorter in Italian.
“Canzoncine” is musical on the tongue. It means “Little Songs,” and is the title of a short piece that serves as a stand-in for one of poetry’s welcome responsibilities.
With the hexameter of a black and white cat
and the white poplars, serene in the rain,
your look turned into astronomy
and everything was vast and beyond time and every
nightmare, for a whole afternoon,
left me.
The great Greek poet Cavafy once pleaded, “Fetch your drugs, art of poetry/that make one unaware, for awhile, of the wound.” De Angelis also does that, brilliantly and paradoxically, even when he is staring straight into the vast abyss. Go there with him and soar.
