Poem: My Mother’s 1950’s Refrigerator by Maria Gillan

My Mother’s 1950’s Refrigerator

My mother had this 1950’s refrigerator, the kind
with the small freezer built inside where the ice
would build up like stalagmites and the motor
would whir when it signaled that the temperature
inside was going up. My mother earned her living
with a needle. Sometimes we’d play around her
when she sewed in the old brown rocker,
the basting threads piling like clouds around her.
We pretended we were jumping off cliffs when we’d climb
on the arm of the sofa and jump off, though we’d jump
quietly so she wouldn’t know, because children
were supposed to be seen and not heard. The twenty-five
cents an hour that she earned provided the pennies
she’d give us to buy cones at Burke’s ice cream parlor.
I think sometimes of the cartons of blueberries I buy
at $3.95 a pint and remember my mother’s refrigerator
that was always full of homemade food—bread, meatballs,
braciola, spinach, broccoli rabe, but no blueberries,
this small berry I didn’t taste until I was a grown woman
and married myself, and I imagine my mother’s horror
at the thought of her spoiled daughter paying $3.95 a pint
for blueberries just because she wants them.

By Maria Mazziotti Gillan
from The Place I Call Home (NYQ Books)

The Place I Call Home Reviewed by Grace Cavalieri

In the July issue of The Washington Independent Review of Books, poet Grace Cavalieri includes in her reviews of outstanding poetry books Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s The Place I Call Home (NYQ Books.

Sometimes a book is a meaningful end from a meaningful journey. So is Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s The Place I Call Home. These are high quality memories Gillan secures with a sharp mind. Only the truth can turn a shy 15-year-old’s story into a great drama— because a simple assembly of facts and feelings would be nothing without the backlight of authenticity and compassion. Gillan teaches her writing students “be who you are.” She proves the point. For a child of immigrants, it can be a cold climate outside of the family; events can be devastating—Gillan turns imbedded secrets into historical period pieces. What is confessional poetry? It can be passionate self-absorption, or intrusion. Gillan avoids this, elevating the art by drawing connections we can recognize. In spirit, there is equity. This is her genre. In The Place I Call Home each poem paints a scene, leads up to a revelation, is a picture of daily life without pretention. And your writing students will not say “But what does it mean?”

Grace Cavalieri is the author of several books, chapbooks of poetry; and 23 staged plays. She founded "The Poet and the Poem" on public radio, and now produces the series from the Library of Congress, in its 34th year on-air.To hear Grace Cavalieri’s interviews with Michael Collier and Maria Mazziotti Gillan, go to http://www.loc.gov/poetry/poetpoem.html

Grace’s recent books, Sounds Like Something I Would Say, Millie’s Sunshine Tiki Villas and Anna Nicole: Poems are also available free on Kindle’s Lending Library.

Review: The Place I Call Home

Maria Gillan's newest collection of poems, The Place I Call Home, was reviewed by Ragazine's Poetry Editor, Emily Vogel.

"A Spiritual Landmark (and a Glimpse at Horror)" (excerpt)

Typically, when we think of “place” we consider first its physical geography, what exists in its proximity and what best describes its coordinates and physical dimensions. To consider that a “place,” perhaps besides being a physical location, is also a dimension of the memory, a particular habitat of the mind and heart which cannot be drawn on a map, suggests a type of vault of emotional reserve that can best be channeled through the medium of poetry. Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s book of poems, “The Place I Call Home” (forthcoming from NYQ Books in September) easily taps into this dimension, and while the landmarks that might be mentioned in many of the poems are recognizable as physical realities, there are without doubt other “spiritual landmarks” which carry the reader through all fifty-two poems so that we’re not only in a city in New Jersey, but also journeying through the story of the “self,” which has its own “emotional coordinates,” in its own right.

Gillan succeeds in constructing the “herstory” of an Italian immigrant girl. Her work is honest and bears the integrity of a woman/narrator we’d all like to sit down with and have four o’clock tea (or espresso), tell stories, and exchange matters of heart. She recalls the details of her growing up with a sense of real specificity and awareness. While reading the book the first time, I received what I’m used to after reading the last line of a really good poem or novel: the chills – what I’ve come to know as a brush with the Holy Spirit. It is the kind of physical sensation which demands you just appreciate the beauty of the poem without the need to examine it immediately for its deeper meanings with an “intellectual” ear...

continue reading....

The Place I Call Home is forthcoming from NYQ Books  in September 2012.