BOOKS
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Ovid" calls up the complaints an impatient reader might have with the
work-"You can't say a Senator, or his wife, screw dogs / and expect peo–
ple to appreciate your style," or, "He's picking up the phlegmy local
language; / he pretends to make small talk with the street vendors."
Like Crane and Williams before him, and like some other talented liv–
ing poets (Alan Shapiro,
C.
K.
Williams, and Jason Sommer come to mind),
Di Piero has staked a claim at the interval between heightened poetic
speech and the language hooks of advertising, between sincere oratory and
a street-smart insult. Always, the poems surprise with the madcap tumble
of roiling diction.
One of the most convincing poems in the collection is "Shrine with
Flowers," a moving elegiac sequence that opens the collection. It possesses
lyric ease, a well-balanced sense of sentiment, and resonant compassion.
The other poem I keep returning to and marveling at in its cyclone-like
attraction, its ability to pull anything and everything into its orbit and yet
to maintain its form and its force, is "Saturday Afternoon." The following
is but a glimpse of the world that soon becomes a Jonah-like descent into
the belly of the great fish:
But just then Charlie lifted me above his head, saying
"0 Billy Boy you've never in your life seen this! Want it?"
The ground gone, steep drag of thinned air, chicken squawk
tingling in my ears
with
dim human voices. Charlie threw me in the sea.
The underplace, swallowing my heart, opened like a horn of plenty,
blood channels lit blue and red like pinball arteries, flesh-motes,
mucus, sinew, pulsing viscera bits dripping from the clothesline.
And on the belly of the "whale" we are offered:
A flayed, ripening Christ.
An Ohio puddler stirring pigiron mash, whose back is the same one
in Giotto's Gethsemane that stays the hand slicing off a soldier's ear.
Mercury, my heart, the sickening beautiful shiftingness of things.
And that is what W S. Di Piero best captures throughout this collection–
"the sickening beautiful shiftingness of things" in a language that takes the
raw and the wrought and melds them.
ERIC PANKEY
