Supplications: Immediate Poems of Loss and Love by Franco D’Alessandro

1 review for Supplications: Immediate Poems of Loss and Love by Franco D’Alessandro

1. 

   Rated 5 out of 5

   Bruce Smith – February 7, 2018

   American poetry has been in great trouble since the close of WW 11, when
   it became heavily politicized and,for all purposes, virtually dead. The
   standard was held at some height — but in a minor key — by Marianne Moore, H.D. and James Merrill, among a small handful of others. Our American giants: Frost, cummings, Stevens, Pound had become numb with American academic sluff. The greatest American poet of them all, T.S. Eliot, had fled to England early on, finding there that ‘history is now and England,” for “a people without history is not redeemed from time.” Eliot, who was published for the first time in Chicago’s Poetry Magazine, did prognosticate and scry and seemed to amble as easily into the future with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The Wasteland” as he would amble The Strand of a night thirsting for good talk and a bourbon. That was the American future he knew would come as surely as WW 11 was but an extension of WW 1, bad business having to be settled so the future he saw so clearly could be got on with. Now we know quite clearly that bad business is the order of the day and it is no metaphor. True poetry is largely impossible to create now. There is no foundation in academe or our broader ‘culture’ for it. Publicists posing as professors assign pc poetry so eviscerated of the blood of verse that it falls as dead from the page as yesterday’s blog. How, then, did playwright Franco D’Alessandro ‘make’ (in Dante’s terminology) this early book of blessedly real poetry? Surely he was freed from the blanketing ethos of the day by his keen awareness of it, moving from shade to light, his heart, mind and soul open to the urgent but gentle promptings of his Muse. Here the febrile strands of his life’s endured suffering of death and loss are bravely woven in the unyielding light of an Assisian sun. Poetry, the real thing, is human truth. Unavoidably painful but
   assembled in such a fashion as to engage a balancing act of genuine emotions, which makes of life not a dark quagmire but a prize to be celebrated. This simple book holds the real thing. It is poetry. Therefore it is light. And is that not what we need more of, always?