Skirts and Slacks [Hardcover]

W.S. Di Piero (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 22, 2001

W. S. Di Piero, a fresh and powerful voice in American poetry, opens this collection about public and private worlds with poems that revist the deaths of his parents. It is an important adult passage for him, and for them a last chance to leave a message: his father lying in bed, "bemused and contemptuous / of the hell in which he lay"; his mother soon to be laid out in the cheap gold flats "that made her look young and men look twice." Di Piero writes poems of relationships, of ordinary beauty, of the deep, vsieral memories that shape who we become. He reveals the art in the everyday--sometimes literally, as when he spies a Vermeer beauty in a girl with nose studs at the ATM, or Van Gogh's self-portrait in a small-time bookie. Whether describing the uncertainty of sexual love ("...your footpads / wet after a bath / left prints like / our conversations / every which way") or a panhandler in Port Authority ("Show you to your bus / or an excellent candy bar?"), he is delicate and direct at once, a no-nonsense guide to his surroundings who is moved by what he sees. His strong, elegantly simple statements of truths of feeling go beyond the pleasure of the words themselves and restore us to the thrill of honesty in our own lives.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A translator of Euripides, Giacomo Leopardi, Sandro Penna, Leonardo Sinisgalli and others; a careful critic who has produced three books' worth of essays on modern art and poetry; and the author of six previous collections of poems, Stanford University professor Di Piero is as an imposing a masculine representative of tradition on the West Coast as J.D. McClatchy is on the East. But where McClatchy freshens his old school gin-and-tonics with bare bones carnality, Di Piero consistently injects Kleinzahlerian whimsy into his (here 35 plus) short lyrics, along with pathos-laden descriptions of depression's quotidian: "Medicated to this willowed balance,/ I don't weep now to see dogs run/ or wild fennel bend to winds/ kiting a tern from its brilliant marsh." This solemn attention to nature can mutate into Bocaccio-like satire ("Widowed young, renting country-cheap,/ she could have, he swore, anything she wants./ Dried figs, fiery banana fruit, or half a pig.") or a more man-made gravity, as in "My Message Left Next to the Phone," a near-suicide note describing the spirits (prevalent here) who nearly lured the speaker off a bridge: "`figures'/ ...scissored into life, gauds flint-struck/ from the half-dark and sunlight and panic.// I felt they'd come for me." Some readers will want to dismiss this work as well-trod emotional and imagistic ground, but Di Piero never quite descends into easiness, and his ear is a great deal sharper than most poets chronicling their art- and writing-centered lives. (May 30)Forecast: Di Piero has received a Guggenheim fellowship, an NEA grant and a Lila Wallace-Readers Digest award, but hasn't yet taken one of the big three NBCCA, Pulitzer or NBA though this book should make at least one shortlist on career momentum alone. Recommendations to fans of Marie Howe and C.K. Williams would help crack Di Piero's restrictive highbrow aureole.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The central motif of this collection is careful watching of urban landscapes of "pitch and bus fumes," "splintered Sears and Pep Boys doors/ down the block," "stone housefronts," and the Schuylkill River in Southwest Philadelphia (where Di Piero was born). Poet, translator, art critic, and professor at Stanford, Di Piero master of impressionistic candlelight, with his "grassy onion-dome shadows" and "patchy shades" sometimes gets "fogged in" pursuing elusive shapes of "the invisible life of things." When he finds a scene that stays in focus city neighborhoods and parks, bonds among family and friends, the death of his parents Di Piero is precise and emphatic, like a woman in one of his poems who paints "as if it's she/ changing for real the sky's face." Di Piero's dimay at this messy world ("scrap-metal cubes/ and racked junkers") is redeemed by his ardor to record urban landscapes in "exacter, plainer" poetry. Between the everyday ("car wash, tar-shingle roofs,/ U-rent lockers, and tap-rooms") and the lofty ("We take what's given and word/ with that"), illuminated by "mildly crazed words," these thoughtful poetic compositions combine serious imagery with "truth in words" "changing for real the sky's face." Refreshing poetry that gets better with rereading. Frank Allen, Northampton Community Coll., Tannersville, PA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 80 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (May 22, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375411534
• ISBN-13: 978-0375411533
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,973,672 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Poetry of the middle-range, June 11, 2002

By 

Andy Zorc (Yellow Springs, Ohio) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Skirts and Slacks (Hardcover)

This book is quite moving in parts, and Di Piero is obviously a very competent poet. His "less is more" aesthetic, however, often leads him to write boring poems in flat language. His "tell it like it is" attitude kept me interested enough to finish the book, but eventually I felt that original use of language and a willingess to risk experimentation needn't be sacrificed for "emotional honesty." Sometimes less is just less.

5.0 out of 5 stars The book that establishes Di Piero as a master, August 16, 2006

By 

John Domini (Des Moines, IA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Skirts and Slacks (Paperback)

I've praised Di Piero before -- see BROTHER FIRE, the collection that followed this one -- but I must respond to the brainless review below (utterly devoid, please note, of specific referents like quotations or names). I must assert that SKIRTS AND SLACKS stands now, five years after its publication, as one of the very best recent renderings of complex American urban life in poetry. It's a book to praise in the same celebratory terms as Di Piero uses in one of his notable essays about the artform, full of "festive abrasiveness and chafing hilarity."

Such splendid roughness occurs especially in what would call the "South Philly sequence," roughly the opening third of SKIRTS, in which Di Piero returns to the rough-and-tumble Italian immigrant neighborhood of his upbringing. The trip was brought on by his mother's final illness; parents, old hangouts, former touchstones are all much on his mind. But what could've been a mere sentimental journey becomes more penetrating, more illuminating, alive to elements shadowy and carnal and thoroughly, even exasperatingly humane.

Just the way Di Piero skews the plea "forgive me," in the opening poem "'Philly Babylon'" (brought off in what might be called bebop pentameter), establishes his new command of the medium. But if I had to nominate just one poem here as a masterwork, it would be "Leaving Bartram's Garden in Southwest Philadelphia." In this remarkable culture-bridging vision, the poet rides the trolley out of that Philly attraction, the estate of an 18th-Century Quaker botanist, and so comes at once into a dicey neighborhood, where "[t]agger signatures surf red and black / across the wall." Yet this same grafitti recalls what the poet glimpsed in one of Bartram's mansion windows: "A redbird gashed the sunned mullion glass." He thinks: "I'm in the weave."

Such a profound commingling is rendered more subtly and movingly than I can convey here, to be sure, but it's a rare and splendid accomplishment, a transcendent connectedness prompted by gangbangers. Indeed this is a book of miracles in off-the-rack clothing, skirts and slacks.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The most memorable book of poetry in 2001, October 16, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Skirts and Slacks (Hardcover)

Di Piero is a genius. Thank god we have him and his poetry, whose unfailing honesty, moral center, and attention to detail shame the work of his lesser contemporaries.

Still, with no polemic against the phony, highly-voiced, overly-emotional poetry of our day, Di Piero's work stands on its own as terrific. The poem "Girl With a Pearl Earring" is wonderful; his portraits of working class and modern life are consistently beautiful. It's impossible to put this book down without having imagined so much experience in the meantime. Get this! It is honest and true and skilled and mystical and American and lyrical.