Customer Reviews

Skirts and Slacks

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This is one of those poetic voices that seems to believe there's virtue in being boring and following in the footsteps of others. Not one moment of freshness or originality in this whole collection. As a reader of poetry, I find it sad when timidity and resistance to imagination seem to be the principles of composition. Can I have my money back?