An illustrious man of letters, Paul Mariani provides us his ninth guide of poems, which is maybe his most convincing and profound. One in all his first volumes was entitled Epitaphs for the Journey, and now that journey is coming to an finish, as Mariani “raises unanswered questions you dare not ask” about how “we acquired to the opposite aspect. . . we’re destined”. At 80 years previous, he acknowledges, “the sands of my very own hourglass are virtually gone”.
The narrator par excellence, Mariani has many tales to inform from his lengthy and fruitful life. Most of the “unanswered questions” he asks are discovered on this dazzling array of poems – elegiac, ekphrastic, panegyric, pastoral, lyrical, meditative – written in iambic pentameter, free verse, and even Dante’s terza rima. So powerfully various are the subjects Mariani explores, from her ars poetica – portray – to nature in all its manifestations, from heroes like Harriet Tubman and Malcolm X to a disaster like COVID.
Not surprisingly, one of many first locations Mariani raises questions is in his spectacular handful of ekphrastic poems, the place he helps readers see inside a portray (and sometimes the lifetime of its artist), but additionally exhibits how portray provides us learn. by Picasso Guernica, Mariani asks: “Pilgrim, what are we going to do with all this”. In the home of Georges de La Tour Joseph the carpenter, Mariani exhibits how the mortal and the divine coexist in love. “From the darkness behind the person who turns the augur into wooden”, symbolizing a tau cross, we see the newborn Jesus holding a candle that appears to cross “radiantly . . . by the [his] Hand outstretched.” This gentle radiates the face of Jesus as he helps Joseph, the protector and educator, mannequin of earthly obedience.
In Bastien-Lepage’s portray poor warblerthe little lady reveals a “look” that awakens our sympathy, “earlier than you additionally flip your again” in tears, as Mariani does when she comes throughout an previous buddy’s daughter after mass, her face masked, however wounded by a “crack” together with his brother.
Once more, in “Wheatfields Filled with Cypresses”, Mariani hyperlinks Van Gogh’s “pasty blue” sky with its “mottled clouds” to the “inky clouds” that Gerard Manley Hopkins noticed in Dublin “with its personal finish coming.” . Mariani then connects these photos on this small masterpiece with the parable of the sower, emphasizing how the painter, the poet-priest, and Mariani himself fight the “darkish fields” of life. Opposite to the view of up to date critics that Seurat’s pointillist A Sunday in La Grande Jatte was irreligious or in unhealthy style, Mariani agrees with the artist that every part is “floating right here / as if frozen in eternity, merging in limitless level harmonies”, revealing “an Eden like nothing nobody has seen earlier than”.
But when Seurat exhibits us Eden, Picasso exhibits us hell. Here is Mariani’s scary first line: “Like battle itself, paint will swallow you.” Identical to Mariani’s descriptions of Picasso’s apocalyptic photos: a “howling Pieta”, a Holy Spirit (dove) that “screams in anguish”, the blood of a “disembodied head” and a crumpled soldier, “the crooked eyes within the demise. ” Ultimately, nevertheless, the final two ekphrastic poems, on the work of Caravaggio The Name of Saint Matthew and Supper at Emmaus, summarize the Christian hope and love that animate Mariani’s canon. Just like the apostles, we’re summoned by Mariani’s poems about Caravaggio, nevertheless shaken we’re “by what is absolutely occurring earlier than our eyes.”
Mariani additionally seeks knowledge amongst her “beloved ghosts”, together with these generations of her household “that lie silently someplace in my blood”. There are additionally poems about his lifelong literary associates, Philip Levine, the unbeliever who may recite Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go kindly to that good evening” so movingly that he “may flip even an agnostic right into a believer,” and Bob Pack, one other skeptic, whose conversations with Mariani seemed like “two rabbis” the place “blessed banter flows”. Mariani is wanting ahead to laughing with them once more once they cross the massive divide. After which there’s the poem about Saint Margaret – who, on the point of the crossing, meets Mariani’s spouse Eileen, telling her that they’re going to have lunch collectively “on the opposite aspect”. For Mariani doesn’t invoke demise with out resurrection.
the tour de power of All That Will Be New it’s the five-page “Periplum of Poets”, a Dantesque poem by Mariani that begins along with her “turning from darkness” to see “a light-weight coming my method”. It’s his late trainer and mentor Allen Mandelbaum. Like Virgil, Mandelbaum introduces Mariani to all of the poets whose biographies he wrote after spending “years searching for a actuality” amongst “these treasured stays they left”. Mariani couldn’t make a stronger assertion in regards to the function ars poetica performed in all these “unanswered questions” to which he seeks solutions. Among the many parade of ghostwriters are Wallace Stevens, John Berryman, the “Jersey Physician” William Carlos Williams (who in one other poem Mariani extols for getting life proper, “which nonetheless thrills me all these years”), the “nervous Robert Lowell ”, Hart Crane, and Hopkins, who created the fantastic thing about life’s “blue and somber grays”, elevating Mariani’s creativeness to supply her “comfort”.
Operating by these poems is Mariani’s insightful description and deep reflection on nature, each in its splendor and in its tumultuous energy. Just like the work and poems that had been central to his life, the pure world additionally reveals the glory of the Divine. “God’s creation, all this so good, so good.” Timber, rivers, birds and flowers bear the mark of holiness in Mariani’s poems. The 131-year-old catalpa exterior his house is in comparison with “a silent guardian angel”, the snow moon over Singer Island reminds him of “the host the priest lifts” and each tree and leaf is “a part of the mysterious flower of God. ”
Leaves maintain a particular place in creation for Mariani. “Suppose how in time these branches will sway / their approach to sprout and sprout once more in spring.” What nature expects can also be what humanity expects: renewal and redemption. So central are the leaves {that a} world with out them could be “like phrases silenced as they’re misplaced”. Mariani’s sheets, after all, like Walt Whitman’s, are the pages of his books stuffed with phrases that have not been misplaced.
However All That Will Be New doesn’t omit the relentless tragedies of life, such because the plague of the coronavirus, the harrowing journey of the Black Moses, Harriet Tubman, or the “primordial tensions of those pure forces” such because the tumultuous waves within the “huge Atlantic” “crashing in opposition to the shores of jagged granite” and the “explosive silver-shining foam” which is “as historic and now instantaneous because the whirlpool confronting Job.” With Job, Mariani tried to maintain the trail of salvation regular.
