| As we get older, we become more serious about
having fun, almost as serious as the children that we were
are now as their relatives play outside our windows. Our mortality
legislates thus. For decades of her glorious life, poet Maria
Mazziotti Gillan has shared the fun of her poetic memoir of
growing up female, Italian-American, human in northern New
Jersey. Like W.C. Williams and Alan Ginsburg before her, Maria
Gillian has had serious fun chronicling growing up in Patterson,
New Jersey, directing The Poetry Center at Passaic County
College, editing the Patterson Literary Review, directing
the SUNY-Binghamton creative writing program, blessing readers
with Italian Women in Black Dresses,
Things My Mother Told Me, and Where
I Come From. Her new volume offers fearless,
absolutely fearless fun at plumbing the paradoxes of love
down deep into care-giving, loss, grief, elegy and the triumph
of love.
Maria Mazziotti Gillan's new volume opens with "People Who
Only Live in Photographs," a hauntingly honest poem:
My mantle is lined with photographs of the dead;
Those people who live only in black and white.
Their faces, serious and self-contained, watch
Sofas and chairs.
Dennis's great-grandmother and great-grandfather
Stand in their Victorian wedding clothes: he, in his
Stiff high-necked shirt, black suit; she, in her
High-necked gown, starched and pleated bodice,
Plumed hat. They are not smiling, but look
Prosperous and poised, a standard photo, circa 1892.
Ginsburg would have approved of the emotional rawness already,
but listen to the tone and mood change.
And here is Dennis's father as a young man
In his captain's uniform, a Bing Crosby look-alike.
He is pleased with himself and the world, next
To my father at sixteen in his first posed photograph,
Proud and serious in his high-topped shoes,
Dark suit and white collar, a formal bouquet
Of flowers on the table. It is this photograph
His mother carried until she died, though he left
Italy when he was sixteen and never saw her again.
Already the sense of separation, of loss, of private reality,
is palpable.
My grandmothers, whom I never met, stare
Out of inexpensive frames. Beside Dennis's
Grandmothers, who sit stately in their sterling
Oval frames, look poor and worn.
Looking at them, these people I see every day,
I think how little I know to tell a snippet of a story,
A name-nothing else. How little of their past
We can pass on to our own children and grandchildren.
My mother did piecework in a factory for fifty years,
Sewing sleeves in coats for a few cents apiece.
I tried to piece together the past of these people
Who exist now only in frames by asking questions,
But there is no one left to ask.
I wrote poems about my children as they grew up,
My mother and father, small bits I remembered
About my grandparents. I think now these poems are photos
Of a past whose details otherwise no one would know.
We know them, Maria Gillan. And we know them because of
you.
The poem "Nighties" from All That Lies Between
Us looks back on the early years of marriage,
lovemaking, and concludes: "I felt so sophisticated in those
nightgowns,/ so like the ones Doris Day wore in movies./ Only
years later, when my daughter buys me/ a nightgown made of
soft and smooth blue silk,/ do I realize that the first ones
I owned/ were cheap imitations of this, the one/ I hold now
to my cheek, grateful/ to have been once what I was.// How
Lucky I am to have loved you/ in nylon, silk, my own incredible
skin." The narrator and the poetess behind her does no doubt
have incredible skin, and, more importantly, an incredibly
brave heart that fully recognizes both the pain and joy, the
dualistic nature of love, yin and yang, that makes that love
all the more real. And Maria Gillan plays hard too because
she recognizes mortality.
Consider "In the Movies No One Ever Ages." The first of its
two stanzas offers:
I wish I could say the same for me,
But that's what's so wonderful about the movies.
The people on the screen remain as they were,
Yet for me, when I look back at our lives,
You too are caught in freeze-frame, light
Coming off you, the planes of your handsome
Face, your perfect, muscular body.
Do you remember walking through
The New York Botanical Gardens?
You, your mind filled with facts
Like an encyclopedia, your photographic
Memory, told me all about the flowers
And birds and the trees inside the towering
Greenhouses. We talked and kissed behind
The exuberant vegetation of the African rainforest,
Tropical birds skimming the air above our heads.
Notice the power of the perfectly placed "exuberant" after
the young-lovers- making-out-in-the-gardens vignette…Here
is that poetic irony of offering up the loving particulars
to be universal in theme. Amen. One suspects, too, that Maria
Mazziotti Gillan's narrator knows the flowers on her own and
chooses to be "taught" by a loving husband out of the choice
of love. The last stanza speaks of love over time, of time
and chance happening to us all.
Do you remember the concert
At Columbia too and how exciting
It was to hear Pete Seeger sing in person?
We walked together across that moonlit campus.
These moments are what I hold now when
I see you struggling to win against a disease
That has robbed you of almost everything.
Each day is one less thing you can do,
Though you can still hold my hand,
Put your frail arms around me.
This is the best of confessional poetry, when the one, through
haunting imagery, can be made to be the all, every woman,
every man. That was Pete Seeger's secret as he sailed the
Hudson River long ago and sang to earnest young people everywhere.
That is Maria Gillian's secret.
Diane di Prima said in next-to-best: "These poems are powerful
in their honesty, their passion and their grief. They take
us deep into the labyrinth of our humility and -in the face
of loss and death- show us the paradox of love in the center
of our being."
Maria Mazzzotti Gillan says it even better in All
That Lies Between Us, the familial territory
she inhabits better than anyone else. Ever since she "reclaimed"
herself as a woman and as Italian with her signature poem
"Daddy, We Called You" at the ripe young age of 50, the
personal territory between us has been Maria Gillan's subject,
explored so carefully that critical homages to her important
body of work are extant. "Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Essays
on Her Works" (Guernica Writers Series, Sean Thomas Dougherty,
Ed.) will introduce a new generation of scholar/poets to
her territory. So will the poems to come, like "What We
Pass On," from late in All That Lies Between
Us:
My son is handsome, like my husband and grandson.
They look like cookie-cutter men the three of them,
My husband obviously the oldest since his illness
Left his face lined and drawn, my son looks
Exactly as his father looked at thirty-seven.
My grandson is a miniature version
Of the two of them, but my son and grandson
Walk the way I do on my flat feet, chunky
And turned out slightly, only they hit the ground
Harder. My grandson emulates his father's walk,
His hands hooked in the pockets of his pants,
His shoulders swinging. Like my father, my son
Never gives up. Like me, he needs to heal the world,
Needs to be responsible for everyone.
Though my grandson is only seven, he reminds me
Of my mother with her exuberant laugh,
Her abundant energy, her loving heart, the parts
Of all of us, even the ancestors I never met,
Caught in my son and grandson. My grandson
Trudges into the world on his wide feet, in him
I see my twin. I love the way he loves the feel
Of my satin nightgown on his face, the way
He attacks his food with gusto, the way it makes him happy,
The way he looks in his little electric car that he piles
With leftover lumber from the construction site,
And he drives down the hill behind the house,
Wearing his hard hat, dumps one load of wood,
Goes back for another because he wants to build
A tree house. He drives up the street, stops
At Carina's house, picks her up and they drive off,
As though he had picked her up for a date.
How mixed up this genetic code that sends
My mother back to me in this boy
Growing up in North Carolina
As far from any place
My mother had ever seen.
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