ll that Lies Between Us by Maria Mazziotti Gillan (Guernica, 2007) Talismans: Talismani: Poems/Poesie by Maria Mazziotti Gillan, trans. into the Italian by Elisabetta Marino (Ibiskos di A. Ulivieri, 2006) Maria Mazziotti Gillan: Essays on Her works, ed. by Sean Thomas Dougherty (Guernica, 2007)
I have been reading Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s poetry for years. I have probably written more on her work that I have any other poet, Italian or otherwise, since I started this column more than thirty years ago. At this writing, she has published ten books of poetry, all well received and widely read. As both poet and critic, I always look forward to reading her latest book.
The question that I always ask myself when I receive one of her new books of poems is the same: where will Gillan take me in this new collection. She is inventive. Her topics are varied, though her poems have become identified with her Italian American experiences rooted in her first-generation, Italian past while growing up in New Jersey. So it did not surprise me, when I began reading All that Lies Between Us, that about midway in her collection Gillan takes a surprising turn in her subject matter, though the tone and the voice remain distinctly Gillan’s.
In her latest she writes about the very personal and difficult subject of “all that lies between” herself and her husband of over three decades. Not all the poems are about her married life. The opening poem in the collection is about ancestors in family photographs, where she laments in one line, “How little of their past / we can pass on to our own children and grandchildren.”
The others that follow are on familiar subjects in Gillan’s canon, growing up first-generation Italian in New Jersey, her prom dress, spiked heels, her father, and sister. These poems are all a prelude to what comes next in the collection. Beginning in the 1960s American literary critics defined a group called “Confessional Poets.”
But there is little in the work of these famous poets, among them Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Ann Sexton, that can compare to Gillan’s poems in the emotional risks she takes. In the first place, Gillan is a fearless writer, self-assured in the prosaic form that her free verse poems take. The San Francisco Renaissance poets, otherwise known as the Beats, brought the vernacular back into American poetry. In the rhythm and length of her line, Gillan refines that vernacular tone.
To read her is akin to having a conversation with the poet: to listen to one of her readings in person is to feel as though she is speaking directly to you. She is not afraid to begin “Housework and Buicks with Fins” with a line that we have all spoken or heard countless times in our lives, “When we were first married...” Gillan speaks in these poems with a self-confidence that is rare in American poetry.
“Trying to Get You to Love Me” and “Housework” are the opening poems that take Gillan and her reader into a self-confessional, harrowing experience that probes the emotional and psychological depths of her long and now problematic relationship with her husband, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease. Her poems make the poetry of that older school appear disingenuous, contrived in their appeal to what was then an audience hungry for angst and psychological trauma in literature to support their literary theories about the decline of America.
Gillan’s poems are not about the decline of American culture, but about one woman’s struggle to live a dignified life in the face of the unimaginable stress that her husband’s illness brings to their relationship and her family at large. She writes about one evening when they go out for dinner, and her husband, Dennis, tells her, ‘I’m getting worse... I’m scared.’ “I hear your words and think / how caught we are in our own skins / how hard it is to feel what someone else/ feels.” In the courageous poems that follow in the collection, Gillan examines her feelings, her doubts, her weaknesses, and her love for her husband.
In “What a Liar I Am,” she begins, “I have been lying for a long time now, / the sicker you get the more I lie / to myself most of all. I cannot say / how angry I am that this illness / is another person in our house, so lies / are the only way to get through each day... O love I could not / have imagined it would come to this.” In “On an Outing to Cold Spring” she confronts the wrenching advice of a lawyer who tells her, to save herself from financial ruin, she must divorce her terminally ill husband of so many good years and so many happy memories.
She concludes her poem, “... today we are admitting / that you are racing downhill / like an out-of-control sled, / and nothing I can do will stop you.” These poems are raw expressions of the self, not lines processed through literary artifice. She ends her collection by returning to lighter, though no less profound subjects: her immediate family, including her mother, daughter, son, and grandchildren. In “The Dead are Not Silent,” she writes that the past is always in its manifold ways alive.
Long-dead relatives come to her in her dreams: “They come to my room at night. / I wake up to find them standing above me: / my mother, her face unlined, now a face / from which suffering has been erased.” Like her mother’s unlined face, Gillan finds peace and consolation in these images of her past life growing up Italian American in New Jersey.
There is time for healing in her poems, the joy of grandchildren or the simple things, “the small pleasures, the sweet taste of cappuccino / in my mouth, the slow melting of a chocolate square / on my tongue or sitting on a hotel bed / with my twelve-year-old granddaughter.” Gillan is not without a perspective on her life, in spite of its sometimes sad, stressful moments. There is humor in her poems, which is a major aspect of her character that makes her joy to be around whenever I see her at readings or national conventions. In the last poem, she mocks herself as a “Couch Buddha.”
She writes, “My daughter calls me Couch Buddha / because people always come to me / for advice and help.” She ends the poems by calling herself a “poor weak Buddha who eats / the troubles of the world / and answers riddles for everyone, but can’t find the way out / for herself.”
As Talismans demonstrates, her poems work well in either language. Gillan’s vernacular lines translate well. The essays on her works edited by Sean Dougherty are an important start to bringing that much needed discourse to her poetry, which deserves a more visible place on the shelf of contemporary American literary.
Kenneth Scambray’s most recent books are Surface Roots: Stories (Guernica, 2004) and Queen Calafia’s Paradise: California and the Italian American Novel (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007.) His poem “Piece Work” won the Editor’s Choice Prize for the 2007 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize sponsored by The Paterson Literary Review.
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