Customer Reviews

Things My Mother Told Me (Essential Poets Series 95)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I love this book. It is honest, direct, moving, and explores the territory of the ordinary life of a woman in poems that lift off the page, they are so lyrical and brilliant. Maria Mazziotti Gillan leads us on a journey into her Italian-American working-class girlhood and explores the complexity of carrying that girl inside her for the rest of her life. This a book about relationships within a family, mothers, fathers, children,husband, friends, place --all are clearly delineated and evocatively expressed. Anyone interested in Italian American literature or working class literature or literature by women should read this book. It is wonderful. i keep it next to my bed to read it againa and again.

I love this book. It is honest, direct, moving, and explores the territory of the ordinary life of a woman in poems that lift off the page, they are so lyrical and brilliant. Maria Mazziotti Gillan leads us on a journey into her Italian-American working-class girlhood and explores the complexity of carrying that girl inside her for the rest of her life. This a book about relationships within a family, mothers, fathers, children,husband, friends, place --all are clearly delineated and evocatively expressed. Anyone interested in Italian American literature or working class literature or literature by women should read this book. It is wonderful. i keep it next to my bed to read it againa and again.

I expected to find some wisdom presented in a poetic way, but the poems were drab and sounded like prose. There is nothing new here and the poet seems uninspired and provencial. I was looking for good Italian American poetry, but this isn't it. I've read DiPrima, Barolini's book, Gioseffi, Stefanile, Ciardi and From the Margin, Writings by Italian Americans from Purdue U. Press and enjoyed them better for their craft and imagination. There are many good Italian American poets who reach more out of themselves into the world. Gillan's not dreadful, just not very original as these other Italian American writers. Perhaps, she should stick to editing. I recommend the other authors named above as more fully realized poets and they are all available at Amazon.com, too.

Gillan is a true poet. These poems speak honestly and from the heart. Anyone interested in poetry with these qualities will be happy to add this book to his/her collection.

Things My Mother told Me reads like a novel, each poem a chapter of a remembered life, each memory informed by an earlier memory already translated into texture and language, into the images and sensations that combine to make Maria Mazziotti Gillan's work at once so familiar and yet so new, so distinct and evocative. I often felt submerged in the text, pulled along on the currents of story and song, full of longing for a geography of place both physical and emotional.These are poems full of grace and of the exquisite light of the river in paterson at dusk, where the poet's journey begins, and which has now reacheed the shores of all our lives.

BOOK REVIEW FOR AMAZON.COM Things My Mother Told Me

Maria Mazziotti Gillan is one of the most influential living Italian-American poets. She is also active in the field of multi-ethnic poetry, and is the editor of the prestigious Paterson Literary Review. Her poetry has been compared to the poetry of the great William Carlos Williams, who came from the same area in New Jersey. And from William Carlos Williams (whom she loves), she has learned that great poetry comes from "the cup that runneth over" , that is, from emotion, from intuition, and from the genuine wonder at the marvel of life. Hers is poetry that is deceptively simple and that is based on content, images, and recollections, rather than semantic funambolism. Her poetry also pivots around recollection, in that she follows Wordsworth's tenet that poetry is "life recollected in tranquility."

Although Mazziotti Gillan's poetry deals essentially with her experience as an Italian-American, it transcends her own ethnic origins to reach a reality that encompasses all shades and shapes of American faces and the many ways to be American.

Maria Mazziotti Gillan is the founder and director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, New Jersey, and editor of the Paterson Literary Review. With her daughter Jennifer Gillan, she coedited the acclaimed 1994 anthology Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry and Identity Lessons: Contemporary Writing About Learning to Be American, published by Penguin in 1999. She is also the author of seven books of poetry, including Where I Come From: Selected and New Poems (Guernica), The Weather of Old Seasons (Cross Cultural Communications), and Winter Light, an American Literary Translator's Award winner. She has had several poems published in The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and Poetry Ireland, as well as in numerous other journals. Awards for her work include the 1998 May Sarton Award, two New Jersey State Council on the Arts fellowships, and a Chester H. Jones Foundation Award. In addition, she was a finalist in the PEN Syndicated Fiction competition. She has appeared on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, Leonard Lopate's Books and Co., and Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac. Her latest book, Things My Mother Told Me, was published by Guernica in 1999. Currently, she is at work on a memoir entitled My Mother's Stoop.

Maria Mazziotti Gillan's poetry is bold and gutsy, in that it deals directly and unflinchingly with the complicated terrain of race and ethnicity in the United States. It also boldly deals with feeling, family, and expectations, with love and longing, with childhood and old age. Mazziotti Gillan is a courageous, risk-taking poet, who does not hesitate to bare her soul. She reveals the most intimate details of her life, her family relations, her experiences as a child, as a lover, as a wife, as a mother. These experiences, far from being only Italian-American, belong to the universal realm and reflect the destiny of "Every Woman".

I have personally seen and heard Maria recite her poetry at many of her well-attended poetry readings. Having broken, a long time ago, her personal womanly silence, Mazziotti Gillan speaks, in her poetry as well as in person, with an assertive, inspiring voice that at times takes on prophetic, ieratic tones. She is not, however, devoid of humor.

Maria Mazziotti's poetry, in simple and direct language, explores the universal experiences of all humans, from childhood, to adulthood, to old age. Some of the poet's strongest poems, in this good-looking book by Guernica Press, reveal her own poetic itinerary in the world of men and in the magic Kingdom of Words.

This is a book that I highly recommend-a fresh, moving, inspiring book.

A Reader in California

This is not poetry. This is maudlin, banal sentiment formatted to look like poetry. Poetry is compressed, surprising, insightful, fresh, musical. This isn't.

Gillan doesn't quite reach the heights of poetry. She's not terrible, just passably digestible. Her real talent is in promotional work. She has been good, it seems, at spreading poetry around New Jersey, and along with her administrative work, her own name. Gillan's work isn't really much worthy of recognition, because it lacks verbal grace, originality and substance. She's okay, just not stirring or enlightening. I'd pass on this one.

This poet-whom few seem ever to have heard of--seemed worthy of trying. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. My mind and heart were open, but Gillan's poetry isn't bad enough to be interesting and not good enough to spend money and time on. Gillan is okay, but nothing in the book is exciting or really moving. It sort of puts one to sleep with the ordinary, the television sit. com. ideas it explores, the sentimental family life it does not really bring to life. It is simply dull and uninteresting and more worthy of the adjective "prosaic" than "poetic." she has good managerial or administrative skills, it seems from her biographical note. She seems to be known more as an administrator than a writer. What are "the powers that be" thinking? This book is okay, but not original or good--and ceertainly not a good example to student poets. One should read books by Milton Kessler or CK Williams or Sharon Olds or Linda Hogan or Tony Hoagland as an antidote to Gillan.

Unfortunately, the other reviewers here listed must be friends of this poet whom I never heard of before. On their recommendation, I bought the book and was sorely disappointed. It is dull, repetiitious and unimaginative poetry, rather provincial in tone and there is little originality or imagination. I am sorry to say I give it one star and was misled by the other reviewers here. I found other Italian American Writers who were far more exciting, John Ciardi, Emanuel diPasquale, Felix Stefanile, Dorothy Barresi, Daniela Gioseffi, Donna Massini, W.S. diPiero, Sandra Mortola Gilbert, so many good ones-- and they are all more influential in American poetry than Mazziotti Gillan who seems to have been schooled in poetry of the past rather than the present or the future. She takes no risks and no leaps. There is nothing new here at all. No doubt the other reviwers here are friends and associates who sympathize with her simple craft and dull art. Her subject matter lacks universality, and that is the problem. She appears to be very active in poetry and perhaps that is where her talent really lies, in being an entrepreneur as her biographical information depicts. One wishes her well in promoting poetry in general--something she appears to be good at.