Vital Signs by Vincent Casaregola

 

The poems in Vincent Casaregola’s Vital Signs move through the shadows like “old souls carted across eons, / traveling nightly through some / metaphysical underground” (lines from “Transmigration of Souls”). These poems occupy recesses that are often unexplored and unacknowledged. The author gives voice to the physically and psychologically traumatized, the ill, and the injured, as well as those who give care—family, health care workers, and mental health professionals.

–Aaron Lelito, poetry editor of The Closed Eye Open

 

Vincent Casaregola is a poet whose latest collection Vital Signs is focused on the trauma occasioned by our daily interactions with illness, injury, violence, and suffering. These are not easy poems; they do not present a romanticized view of our times. Divided into four sections, the book chronicles a landscape of bodies, broken and lost; indeed, his opening poem “As If Secrets Would Spill,” captures the moments after someone lies in the road “prone. . ./spread-eagled, art for passers-by, / an elegy in the making . . .” The speaker admits to staring “just as you” hoping for some revelation, but the poem concludes “no solace, no insight, no comfort for those / who drive past in search of more.”

 

Bleak yes and yet I was swept along, poem after poem, by the power of the images, the drama of the stories they tell. A case of bullets waits to be activated; an “angry, hidden will” keeps “the finger / pulling shot after shot from the leaping gun.” Structural violence follows an old musician whose poverty pushes him to sleep under a bridge wrapped in a “blanket patched /with bits of duct tape, along with / an old square of blue plastic tarp–.” We know these stories but look away.

 

These poems do not preach or harangue, but they do ask us to pay more attention, to be more present. The third section “Case History Monologues” allows patients to come forward and describe their lives and illness in their own words, not in medicine’s hyper confusing language. I knew enough not to expect a happy resolution; I did receive sharp and precise images of tortured souls who admit the gun “felt good in my hand, / hard and real.” We want an admission, but we only get “I wished to move slowly / and to cut through chaos, /or at least, to reveal it as it is.” Is all knowledge power?

 

The last section “In the Shadow of Corona” traces our introduction to Covid, our gradual realization that this is a plague, and the poems recall earlier times when physicians wore the “Birdman” mask and attempted to help from a safe distance. There is no safety; the poet wonders “When It Will Come” but he leaves us with a final image that does allow a bit of hope, a little faith to intrude: “and sensing light / behind layers of cloud, / I make this rain / my new home.”

 

Vital Signs describes a time of desperation and sorrow, but the poems transcend that with their powerful images and steady rhythms. I will recommend this book to all who love language.

–Deirdre Neilen, Editor, The Healing Muse

 

This collection opens by asking how we know trauma: colors that flow into blood, memories that haunt our dreams, coldness inside and out, the world within that takes over the entire planet. Some poems focus on a moment; others craft a narrative of pain, loss, indifference, and the violence of a bullet that dies as it kills. Vincent Casaregola surveys our world, whether it be the ordinary violence of Ferguson that somehow captured national attention or the warning sign by the elevator that no one reads until it is too late. Later sections group poems of care, isolation, and community, focusing ever more intently on the moments when medicine takes over, with caregivers the ones society charges with responding to trauma of mind and body. This is powerful poetry for anyone who has witnessed, suffered, or treated the traumas that have become too common in our world. Read this book.

–Sara van den Berg, Professor Emeritus of English, Saint Louis University

 

I’ve known Vince since the early 90s, when we hung around Paul’s Books, then the unofficial literary hub of St Louis. And while I’ve always known him to be a formidable professor—I took later one of his classes—it’s been a pleasure to watch his recent and astonishing emergence as a clear poet. In Vital Signs the traumatized and injured speak through him with haunted eloquence. “No one really dies/on manuscripts” we hear. And we are given the vision a little later, “and I will tell you the secret/that the street is a river.” This book will be an artifact and a testimony to those who couldn’t speak but demanded to be heard.

–Matthew Freeman, author of Dopamine and the Devil, forthcoming from Coffeetown Press.

 

 

Poet Vincent Casaregola has crafted an intriguing pathway among the barbs of fear and trepidation that surrounds the dark topic of death.

 

…and death/ becomes the old acquaintance/ clicking through the room with a cane/ smiling, then nodding, and passing by –/ how did death get so old and still not die?

 

Casaregola’s thoughtful collection is organized in four sections that take the reader into surprising spaces and imaginative points of view. Sometimes there is story. Occasionally, a clever tongue-in-cheek. The advent of Covid merits its own section including a series of haiku-like “Fragments of Covid Time.” The book’s final poem takes us home to that mythical underworld river of forgetfulness. We rest in peace.

–Dwight Bitikofer, Retired publisher, current poet, board member of Saint Louis Poetry Center