Keeping My Name (Walt McDonald First-Book Series) [Paperback]

Catherine Tufariello (Author)

Book Description

Series: Walt McDonald First-Book Series | Publication Date: April 15, 2006

2005 Poets' Prize * Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist * Booklist Editors' Choice 2004 “For formalists, this author comes as a gift, a poet fully in charge of her forms, subtle and controlled. She embraces the villanele, Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets, the measured quatrain, rhymed couplets. . . . What excites the reader is watching Tufariello use the limits of these traditions to stretch her creativity.” —ForeWord. “In immaculate, subtly musical meter and rhyme, Tufariello conjures scenes of the city, modern history, marriage and family, love in the Italian Renaissance, and the women of the Bible that fully engage the mind and the heart.” —Booklist. “Tufariello ranges widely in form and subject, all with such aplomb that no less an expert than Richard Wilbur praises her ‘plain, supple eloquence’ and ‘easy command of rhyme, measure, and form.’ . . . Resourcefulness and restraint are rare qualities in contemporary poetry. . . . Tufariello’s poems provide such eloquent examples that I feel no need to explain further.” —R. S. Gwynn, The Hudson Review. With a distinctive blend of craft and deep feeling, clarity and subtle thought, Catherine Tufariello gives new resonance to the historical and mythic past by drawing larger significance and universal themes from contemporary life. From “The Walrus at Coney Island”: All watchers gasp together as he dives, The clumsy fore fins clever now as knives, The dark head bobbing in the dazzling spray Of sun-shot water, like a child’s at play. So this is what he is, has always been— A gleaming, sleekly muscled submarine, Lithe as a dancer, roguish as a boy, Corkscrewing downward with what looks like joy.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Children play furiously in the "asphalt pen" of the schoolyard, and after the bell calls them in, a handyman ascends to the gym roof, "gathers up the balls that got away . . and punts them, in bright arcs, back into play." Sixty years ago in Germany, two student Resistance leaders sail leaflets into a university building's stairwell; porter Schmid catches "the dark-haired young man's shoulder in a rough / Policeman's grip . . and the girl stayed by his side." A very little girl, alone for a minute in a big room during a wedding party, dances. Tufariello conjures such common-enough scenes so vividly that one's mind and heart are fully engaged, and not by means of the virtual prose most new poets still essay, but in meter and rhyme so skillfully employed that they swing a poem's sense as well as its impetus. This is genuinely, though not deliberately, musical verse. From the more public scenes of the poems in the first part of her first collection, Tufariello turns to interfamilial and marital themes in the second, to bittersweet love in translations of early Renaissance Italian poems in the third, to biblical stories of childbearing and women's friendship in the fourth, and in the last, to the story of her later-than-usual pregnancy and the triumphant birth of her daughter. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

"She embraces the villanele, Petrarchand and Shakespearean sonnets, the measured quatrain, rhymed couplets. . ." -- ForeWord Magazine --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 91 pages
• Publisher: Texas Tech University Press (April 15, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0896725758
• ISBN-13: 978-0896725751
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,264,502 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unforgettable Debut, May 4, 2004

By 

Kevin Durkin - See all my reviews

This review is from: Keeping My Name (Walt McDonald First-Book Series) (Hardcover)

Catherine Tufariello is a young poet with an ageless sensibility. I marvel at her seemingly effortless technique, her warm sense of humor, and her muted renderings of desire, sorrow, and joy. A contemporary master of the sonnet, the heroic couplet, and rhymed quatrains, Tufariello writes movingly and wittily of heroines ancient and modern, capturing the essence of their experiences in lines that etch themselves in memory. Take, for example, the closing line of "Rebekah (I)," which sums up this childless women's lament: "My life contracted to a cry for water."

Or consider Tufariello's sumptuously detailed sonnet "Fruitless": Now oleander flames along the beach/ And tart green sea grapes ripen one by one,/ While inland, warm and heavy in the sun,/ The rosy mangoes dangle out of reach./ Alone these languid afternoons, I teach / Myself the names of trees. We're overrun / With litchi nuts, and then, their season done,/ Pick sapodilla, sweet as any peach. // A mass of tangled green, the lawn's gone wild. / Another friend has had another child, / This one (she'd laughed, embarrassed) a surprise./ Small lizards, lithe in torrid silence, dart/ Beneath beseeching sprays of bleeding heart/ And blue and orange bird-of-paradise.

The list of excellent original poems in this debut collection is astonishingly long: "Free Time," "Dana Dancing," "The Walrus at Coney Island," "Epitaph for a Stray," "The Mirror," "The Worst of It," "Pentimento," "No Angel IV," "Rebekah I," "Mary Magdalene," "Keeping My Name," "The Waiting Room," "Ultrasound," "Fruitless," "Useful Advice," "In Glass," "First Contact," "The Dream of Extra Room," "Useful Advice: The Sequel," and "Liana's Song." And then there are the superb translations of Petrarch's sonnets, including "Now you have done your utmost . . . "Oh. Lady, if my life . . ." and "Go grieving rhymes . . ."

The publication of this book is a signal event in American literature. Don't miss an opportunity to own the first book by a poet who will never go out of style.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Wonderful New Talent, May 3, 2004

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Keeping My Name (Walt McDonald First-Book Series) (Hardcover)

This book is comprised of an excellent collection of poetry by a young poet of unusual ability. Her talent is eloquently displayed in a New Formalist motif employing both meter and rhyme, although she displays her virtuosity with free verse as well. A number of her poems display a limitless inner emotion and pathos. Yet she is capable of humor and light-heartedness as well.

Among the most memorable of her poems is "February 18, 1943," a tribute to Sophie Scholl, a leader of the White Rose student resistance movement in Nazi Germany, who was arrested on the titled date and executed shortly thereafter. Clearly this episode moved the author deeply as she named her own child Sophie in tribute, a revelation appearing in both "Thirty Weeks" and "This Child." That this poet is very adept at revealing her deep inner emotions is also demonstrated in "Elegy for Alice," which memorializes a close friend who suffered a premature death.

Ms. Tufariello also tackles lighter subjects with a keen eye for the magic of everyday life as demonstrated by "Dana Dancing," the "Walrus at Coney Island," "Insomnia," and the especially amusing "Crossed Wires" that details the intimacies of an unintended party line in Brooklyn. Yet, it is in her denouement of pathos that she rises to supreme heights. One selection, "Snow Angel," paints a deeply moving protrait of a sister confronting the horror of anorexia nervosa, while others (e.g., "The Mirror," "Ghost Children," "The Worst of It" and "Penimento") bare her own torment in dealing with the reality of a failed marriage.

A delightful poem that gives title to this collection (i.e., Keeping My Name") communicates to the reader why, even after two marriages, the author chose to retain her own long but beautifully melodic name.

Several of the poems deal with the author's desire to bear children, uncluding "Useful Advice," a moving poem detailing the insensitivity of well-meaning friends who offer advice on surefire means to become pregnant. Also included are several poems dealing with technological means of aiding in this process, one of which was successful (e.g., "In Glass").

For me, one of the most powerful poems in this very strong collection is a pantuom entitled, "Zero at the Bone," referring to a phrase in an Emily Dickinson poem (i.e., "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass") that describes one's fright at encountering a coiled up snake ready to strike. Ms. Tufariello draws an analogy of that viper with a cancer ("What touched its fuse until it sprang, Purposive, lithe, and swift as fire?") biding ts time to unmask itself. Finally, the correct diagnosis is made ("Then finally the sirens rang.").

This collection has much more to recommend it, including some beautiful translations of Italian Poetry (e.g., that of Petrarch). It reveals a wonderful new talent and is to be strongly recommended.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be., May 2, 2004

By 

James Green (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Keeping My Name (Walt McDonald First-Book Series) (Hardcover)

Catherine Tufariello's new collection is a startling first appearance. To borrow (as I do in my title) from the famous letter Emerson wrote Whitman after a first reading of the 1855 Leaves of Grass, here a great career begins, which must have had a long foreground judging by the quality of this initial performance. Indeed, I agree with Richard Wilbur that this is "one of the finest first collections I can remember seeing," and that Ms. Tufariello is "a new poet who plays the whole instrument of poetry," which is to say she has an eloquent voice, a tirelessly observant eye and a musically sensitive ear, and she combines all of them seamlessly with a confident, unforced command over the power inherent in poetic meter and form that is rarely heard today. To witness the dazzling formal mastery and variety of this collection flow, organically and inevitably, through observations so acute and expression so delicate they invoke the finest poets in our tradition, is to become reacquainted with the full power inherent in poetic language through a voice that is nevertheless absolutely of our own moment. From a lovely lyric describing a little girl dancing alone at her older cousin's wedding with unfallen joy and egotism to a heartbreaking elegy for a schoolmate, from a delicate villanelle describing a young woman's struggle with anorexia to a stunning tribute to the leaders of the "White Rose" resistance movement in Hitler's Germany, from surprisingly fresh translations of Petrarch and Guido Cavalcanti to delicate personal histories describing the sadness of a broken first marriage and the redemptive joy of a daughter born late during a second, Ms. Tufariello commands the entire keyboard of her art. This is what I read poetry for, and why I hope the art survives the current age.