Michael Anania, Turnings

Literary Review, Fall, 2005 by Michael Morse

Michael Anania, Turnings. Florence: Il Bisonte, 2005.

In "The English Elegy," Peter Sacks notes that the "the work" of elegy is twofold: it exists as a finished "work" and a process unfolding, a "working through." Michael Anania's single-poem chapbook, Turnings, navigates the realm of fixed form and transitive process, revering the ancestral landscape of Calabria even as it mourns the loss of friend and celebrated local poet, Enzo Agostino.

Trinities loom large in the three-part elegy, a mesh of regional language (citations of Agostino's work and epigraphic text), literal and allegorical references to family and regional ancestors, and the light-drenched coast and rocky, wooded slopes of Calabria. The descending stair-step three-line stanzas (with lines of consistent syllabic range and sentence-parsing enjambment) evoke the triadic lines of William Carlos Williams.

Italian readers might hear echoes of the naturalistic and domestic tones of the crepuscolari and recognize, in Anania's lovely evocations of the Calabrian landscape and paratactic lines, the sharp eye of a young Montale in Ossi di Seppia, capturing the sea, sky, sun and cliffs of Liguria. Anania's English suggests a lower octane Hopkins, a music juxtaposing full-bodied vowels with alliterative stops:

   Evening is liquid here,
   shadows welling into each shape,
   each valley, cut and crevice

Anania's use of landscape as a gateway to metaphysical contemplation suggests a kinship with the work of Charles Wright, himself a musical acolyte of Hopkins and another contemporary poet with significant ties to Italian landscape:

   a sparrow hawk wheeling above
   pebblestone, refuge, pinfeathers
   catch the mountain light, the west still
   streaming eastward, out of reach ...

The poem's aural resonance nicely parallels the elegy's visuals of sun, starlight, and goldleaf. The opening section's "rectangular slips of gold," sheets of Greek epigraphy with orphic funerary prayers meant to guide souls into the next world, establish navigation--making one's way through literal and temporal landscapes, embracing both familiar and unfamiliar, and privileging Mnemosyny over Lethe--as the figurative heart of the elegy.

The poem's elliptical shifts offer yet another pleasure. A delightful leap to the final section finds an allegorical woman sewing (not lost is the region's early status as a silkworm and lace capital), reciting the names of the lost over her "spindle-full of flax," her endless thread-turned-rosary. A powerful intertwining of loss and figuration, Anania's seamstress lends the abstract process of mourning and contemplation a satisfying, physical conclusion.

Anania's poem warmly welcomes us--as Agostino's epigraph suggests-into the light of caemory. Much like the goldleaf meant to accompany Magna Grecia's dead, this lyrical map for departing souls is one we claim for our living selves.