Greetings from Elysium by Anthony DiMatteo

$14.49

 

“Often turning to natural imagery, as well as surprising relations, DiMatteo uses the poetic space to gently (though boldly) scare out the emotional deceptions and intellectual inconsistencies that we sometimes live by, often seemingly not by choice. He does so, at first, to let what we already ought to know hang in the air—’Things don’t exist this way’—in effect, forcing his poems (and us along with them) to consider what must come next. While what DiMatteo does poetically after such disarming confrontations can differ, both in terms of his technique and his contemplations, his understanding of the stakes remains consistent: to carve out for us “an utter silence of understanding.”

–Geffrey Davis, author of Revising the Storm, winner of BOA’s A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize.

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

 

Like that of his mentors, Allen Mandelbaum and John Hollander — two writers whom the poetic narrator has overheard “in the forests” of the mind — Anthony DiMatteo‘s voice is one of highly stylized language, dignified in tone, and espousing noble themes. Here is a writer discontent to write only of what he knows, but who insists on imagining the unknown. His Linus sings a song of mystery. With passionate control, he writes of the Sybil. One speaker weeps, having lost the mystery. Like Shakespeare, a voice instructs us, “Play on,” advice which the writer himself takes, expounding through abstraction, concretion, and feeling alike — unhurried, unforced, and uncommon. This is writing of meticulous craft, for — as the narrator observes — “even the gods have law.” Here is a writer speaking to the ages.
–Jennifer Reeser, author of Sonnets from the Dark Lady and Other Poems

 

Poetry of the dark woods of desire and loss, DiMatteo’s mythic, musical verse rises from a dialogue with Homer, Ovid, and Dante, as well as with Yeats, Whitman, Auden, and Stevens. In a virtuoso personal odyssey of sonorities, DiMatteo’s yearnings for flight and transcendence combine with a deep understanding of the fragility of love and the perilous state of our planet. Greetings from Elysium is a volume not to be missed.
–Laury Magnus, US Merchant Marine Academy

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

 

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Greetings from Elysium

by Anthony DiMatteo

$14.49, paper

Anthony DiMatteo is the author of many essays, reviews and poems as well as of the first English translation of Shakespeare’s mythographer Natale Conti. His first book of poems Beautiful Problems was praised for its “subtle mastery of humor that turns serious” (Cider Press Review). Nominated for a Pushcart Prize, his poetry has roamed recent issues of Avatar Review, The Cortland Review, Front Porch, Smartish Pace, Tar River Poetry, Waccamaw and elsewhere. Articles and reviews can be found in College Literature, Connotations, Early Modern Literary Studies, Notes and Queries, Renaissance Quarterly, Spenser Studies, and elsewhere. A reviewer for Choice and former associate editor of College Literature, DiMatteo stubbornly teaches the naked mysteries of art, literature and writing at the New York Institute of Technology. An avid solo-hiker and somewhat competent sailor, he happily lives on Long Island with his wife, the designer and pianist Kathleen O’Sullivan, and their eleven-year old son Michael, two dogs, a rabbit and a canary.

This chapbook was a dozen years in the writing. It features all classical subjects with two powerful women of antiquity receiving the main focus, the Sybil of Cumae and Penelope, Queen of Ithaca and wife to Odysseus. Also, Virgil and Ovid each speak a poem in the collection. What it was to be an ancient rhapsode – before Homer came to dominate – is also a main concern of the work as well as how the ancient view of the poet still has relevance to poetry today.

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

 

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