In the poem that opens this, his ninth collection, one of our most celebrated men of letters contemplates the “primordial tensions” felt in the crashing waves of a Northeaster, the glory and terror of the storm as “the real comes crashing finally down on you.” Contemplating as we all must the unrelenting passing of time and the harsh realities of history, Paul Mariani embodies the filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s dictum that “the artist is the one who does not look away.”
In the face of pandemics, wars, and the open wound of racism, the poet continues his search for those artists, activists, writers, and saints who can guide us through the wilderness and help us preserve the hope that all things can be made new.
Whether he is contemplating painters from Caravaggio to Van Gogh in deft ekphrastic poems, evoking the courageous witness of Harriet Tubman and Malcolm X, or visiting with the poets, living and dead, who have been his masters, Paul Mariani’s lyrical voice rings true. In the end, after the arduous journey that has taken him so far, the poet joins a simple supper, where the real shines forth in the breaking of bread
Table of Content
Contents
Prologue: Northeaster at Prout’s Neck
I
First Light Last
The Carpenter
Poor Fauvette
Wheat Field with Cypresses
It Happens All the Time
Huddie
Elegy for Our 130-Year-Old Catalpa
Instructions for Leaving Behind a Broken World
Snow Moon Over Singer Island
The Poet as Eighty-Year-Old Sous-Chef
One More Token of Beauty for the Taking
II
Those Beloved Ghosts of Compiano
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grande Jatte
Williams’s Paterson [GW1] Those Years Ago
All That Will Be New in the World
A Brief History of Cotton
Harriet
That Morning after the Assassination of Malcolm X
Guernica
On the Isonzo: Giuseppe Ungaretti, August 16th, 1916
One by One They Fall
Covid Boogie
Epiphany, 2021
When Reality Hits
III
A Periplum of Poets
Remembering Phil Levine
Separated by 2477 Miles, I Laugh with Bob Pack over the Phone
Emily Waves from Her Bedroom Window as We Pass By
The Other Side
And Now
The Call
News That Stays News
The Wheel, the Wheel. . .
Supper at Emmaus
Acknowledgments
About the author
Paul Mariani is University Professor of English emeritus at Boston College. He is the author of twenty books, including biographies of William Carlos Williams, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Wallace Stevens. His previous volumes of poetry include Epitaphs for the Journey, The Great Wheel, Salvage Operations, and Ordinary Time. He is also the author of Thirty Days: On Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius and The Mystery of It All: The Vocation of Poetry in the Twilight of Modernity.
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