Chelsea Editions Heading for Valparaiso $20, selected poems by Italian poet Ned Condini, is rich feast. Condini translated the poems himself, and much of the poetry is broad in scope, rather than microscopic or focused in terms of vision. These poems are like Medieval tapestries with brocade, lace, detailed embroidery depicting classic imagery coalescing into Condini’s personal mythos. They are pretty creations, sometimes violent, sometimes meditative, reflecting his Italian heritage and his American life. “I am all eyes,” Condini writes in “Mr.Sammler at the Confessional,” and his eyes gather images as varied from roses, and unicorns, the Panama Canal, to the opaque imagery of Christianity, and offer up poetry seeking connection with quiet, solitude, the breath of the spirit.
In the book’s second section, In Memoriam, the family of the deceased become characters out of history in “They Too, Show Up: Uncle Alex”, “With Johnny, storytelling Triton,/I snorkeled every day to watch him...Do you recall Venus’s imprints on the beach, our toes/tickled by sand.” Later in the collection, in “Blue Hair,” his father’s tools become Vulcan’s tools. This comparison to and mythologizing of family members is from the high Romantic tradition, the recycling of ancient tropes and icons. Condini doesn’t limit homages to antiquity either, in an earlier poem “Brooding in Jacob’s Room” Condini borrows Macbeth’s rhythm and energy to mark despair, “Shadows, shadows. Life is a but a show of shadows.” And this image repeats as the speaker finds that the dead “seems to move/when I,too, move” the age old problem of self and how to change it wrapped up in the memory of the dead. By using “dead” icons and rhythms Condini heightens the distance between the living and the dead, between the past and the present. The anguish of loss is heightened as well, a tone Condini returns to towards the end of the collection when he walks hand in hand with John Berryman’s madness.
One of the repeating images of the collection is the sun. The sun is spirit. The sun is the apex of the muse. The sun is the symbol for God. The sun is the symbol for youth. The sun appears as folly in the poet’s youth in “Saint Denis”, “those were the days I dared to court the sun,” or as a symbol for vigor in “Barnegat” where “suffers play blind man’s bluff with death.” But the sun also is peak of ache and want in “The End of Delight,” as the “summer sprung from all the trees...I on my knees,/will strain through shock to remember, repeat.../demise in every street.” And in the end the sun is like an old friend, or even better, a lover lacing the leafy limbs of a birch tree.
The idea of want, and the isolation that our desires bring is ever present in the poems from “Quartettsatz” where “God does not see him,” and the world “appeared to me who sounded it/with the eyes of an alien,” from “A Woman’s Thoughts” and “His Answer.” And in “Now the Muse Speaks” the poet, presumably, or the speaker, realizes that he doesn’t matter. That in fact he is alien and indifferent to the people and to the world as the muse can be alien and indifferent to the artist. “Nobody has banned you, nobody hates you./It’s even worse: nobody gives a damn.” The title poem of the section, “quartettsatz,” is one of Condini’s masterpieces, a poem fashioned after Schubert and Berryman, a poet whom he carries on a dialogue throughout the latter half of the book, touching on like themes and imagery. Berryman excites Condini, both “quartettsatz” and the later “...386 chod” are energized by the poet’s interaction with the late poet’s tropes. Both poems express an internal struggle with mortality, “God throw another jerk/into a hole, not me” and “Maybe to lose the body is no big deal,” respectfully.
Condini also finds energy in the discovery of isolation. The title poem, Heading for Valparaiso, is a big ambitious travelogue of identity, politics, and humanity, where the speaker finds himself “an exile in a land not mine,” traveling from Lima, to Bolivia, to the sea beyond the Canary Islands, calling out both God and all of the tortured history of the land, Che and all, “show me/ the way, come meet me walking/like Him upon the water.” Here the speaker is the vessel, and the vessel is the speaker as much as it is his spirit. He is poet as witness, and poet as speaker for those who have no voice, for Condini beds down with the rebels, headhunters, the outsiders, in the earth which is home to bones and blood, and the sea a mother and wife.
Condini works spiritually through his poetry, seeking a body of breath, as many of the figures in his poetry seek a relationship to their own physical body. In this sense Condini is a philosopher-poet, or even visionary, for there is hope in looking up to the sun. Hope in a sunny kind of pastorale, as there is hope in divine, even for the subjects of many of these poem for whom consciousness is not kind. Consciousness wasn’t always kind to Berryman, Condini’s muse, or to some of the spirit seekers embroidered in his poetry seeking answers, a way out, to be made “bolder,” or to find the “archangel” who will save them.
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