Stephen Massimilla. Forty Floors from Yesterday. Bordighera Press, 2002
"Here
comes/ a night as vast as America,/ traffic approaching through
stars,/ flakes spinning back into cones/ of light." In his debut
volume, Forty Floors from Yesterday (written in English and published
in a dual-language edition with translation into Italian), Stephen
Massimilla traces a journey. The book’s three individually titled
sections unobtrusively suggest a narrative-"In the twilight of idols;"
"I advance in absent weather;" and "From a far hotel"-a journey
that begins in speculation (literal and figurative) and ends in
retrospection. The remarkably visual poems in this collection range
in landscape from country to city to netherworld, from the shores
of Long Island to Mexico to "the halls of Osiris," and which find
worthy of their attention subjects ranging from an office photocopier
to a Morpho butterfly to Petrarch’s beloved Laura. And let’s not
forget the tines of a rake.
These
poems combine the quotidian with the extraordinary in unsettling
and wholly convincing juxtapositions: "Our blizzard: one ghost rolling
west or east?/ Behind, the flame of your window shivered" ("Departed").
And although Massimilla constantly reinvents the world visually,
he is not content to remain in this sense alone. These poems celebrate
the tactile and the aural, "this/ eye of night, this ever wound-up
world,/ this wound without end, without wind" (Eye of the Cyclone").
Throughout this book, Massimilla explores the potential of words
as not only signifiers but also units of sound. He demonstrates
a remarkable control of forms-sonnet (he often favors a Petrarchan-
Shakespearean hybrid), villanelle, and terza rima (formidable in
Italian, and, as T.S. Eliot could attest when he finished Four Quartets,
even more difficult to manage in English), as well as blank and
free verse.
The poems in Forty Floors from Yesterday admit and even relish an
indebtedness to history and literatures of the past, as the frequent
epigraphs and the title suggest. One can hear echoes of Stevens,
Rilke, Wordsworth, and Bishop, among others (the positively chilling
"blue" poems at the center of the volume remind one of Lawrence),
but the voice of these poems is Massimilla’s own. "The blood itself
has a way of muttering/ That the mouths of the dead are all one
mouth" ("The Mouthless Dead"). Allusion, paradox, and sound device
combine here to generate and
deepen meaning as the poems progress; note, for example, how an
"organ groaning" in the "Parade of the Plagued" suggests both a
sound and a certain attitude toward a sound, points out an anagram,
and anticipates the image in the next line-the wounded figure bringing
up the rear of the procession, "Christ, that bone man, dragging
a banner of blood." It might be easy for a poet as technically skilled
and as well-read as Massimilla to write poems that were sheer displays
of his talents, but he never does this. One senses throughout the
book that these poems had to be written; they mattered to the poet,
and they matter to the reader.
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