A review of Paterson Light and Shadow, with poems by Maria Mazziotti Gillan and photographs by Mark Hillinghouse, and What Blooms in Winter: Poems by Maria Mazziotti Gillan. Written by Kenneth Scambray. Originally appeared in L'Italo Americano; reprinted with permission of the author.
What has always distinguished her poetry, from her very first work to What Blooms in Winter, is her unsparing honesty in her confrontation of some of the most intimate details of family life and her struggles as an Italian-American girl growing up in New Jersey in the years after World War II. It is understandable that, as a daughter of Italian immigrants, the family would be at the center of her poetry. Her poetry has always taken great risks: exposing the guilt she feels over her betrayal of her immigrant parents in the face of her girlhood effort to assimilate into American life to her personal trials with her grown children and now deceased husband.
It is not often in American poetry, which has veered in recent decades towards the university workshop poetry of abstraction, that we can read poetry of such conflicted emotional depth. Among the nearly seventy poems in What Blooms, she writes in one about her grown daughter, betrayed by love and divorced, but now in love again, how she hopes for her daughter’s renewal with a new family. Risky: to write so truthfully about someone so close to you as a mother and writer? In "What I Can’t Tell My Son" she writes of her conflicted relationship with her son, their occasional “10- minute phone calls, those painful, awkward attempts at touch.” In another she writes about her deceased husband who has “crossed over / to that other place where I cannot touch you . . . where I hope you can feel me missing you.” In earlier books she wrote of her ambivalent feelings towards him in a confessional style that left nothing out.
What continues to inform her emotional life expressed in her poetry is her memory of the past, that now-disappeared immigrant culture that was in conflict with her adolescent desire to fit into modern American life. Though Gillan certainly has found her way into a successful life, her poems express, nevertheless, a loss of that past. She writes about the lost family rituals in such poems as, "Christmas Eve at Our House," and about the passing of that immigrant generation, "The Dead Sit Calmly Among Us." She writes that “I want to believe you are still sitting calmly / among us, that I could reach out my hand / and touch the high cheekbone of your face.”
The voice in her poems is adrift in modern life. Her sense of loss connects with long tradition in Italian American literature of that loss of home that came with immigration’s wrenching personal and cultural dislocation in America. This is theme in nearly all immigrant literature. William Saroyan from Fresno wrote poignantly about the great loss that his Armenian ancestors suffered upon their forced immigration and settlement in Fresno. No sooner were immigrants settled in the promised land, they constructed idealized images of their impoverished villages, no matter their poverty in the old world, and in the case of the Armenians, the suffering they endured. That is one of essential conundrums that runs throughout Italian-American and immigrant literature in general.
The strength of Gillan’s poetry is that it is also a poetry of place. There are times when I hear the voice of American poet Phil Levine in her poems. In one of her books, The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets,. she accompanies her poems with her original watercolors, visceral and colorful depictions of women. In this newer book, she has set her New Jersey poems next to Mark Hillinghouse’s stunning black and white photographs in Paterson Light and Shadow.
Maria’s poem “The Young Men in Black Leather Jackets” “who stood for hours / in the front of the candy store / on 19th Street and 2nd Avenue / in Paterson, New Jersey” is opposite Hillinghouse’s stark, ominous black and white urban scene of four young people on a street corner, the street sign “Do Not Enter” captured in the photo.
A photograph of the portal of School Number 18 is set next to Maria’s well-known poem “Public School No. 18, Paterson, New Jersey,” where teachers in word and gesture told Maria, the young working class Italian American girl, “to be ashamed.”
Another poem, “Daddy, We Called You,” about her working-class immigrant father is next to a stark tenement building, a worker cleaning the factory’s windows under a fire escape that zig zags up the side of the multiple story building. It is urban America, stark but offering work to immigrants.
Maria’s paean to the Passaic River is next to Hillinghouse’s contemplative shot of the river under a gray, cloudy sky. The image evokes memories, as Maria’s poems recalls her father’s immigrant past.
Maria Gillan is without argument the most prominent Italian-American writer in the U.S. She has won many prizes for her work, including the American Book Award. Her more than twenty-one books have chronicled the Italian immigrant and post-immigrant experience in America as no other contemporary poet has.
Maria Mazziotti Gillan's most recent books are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow and the poetry collection, What Blooms in Winter . Her collection of poems paired with some of her paintings is The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets. Her new artist website is at MariaMazziottiGillan.com. Maria's poetry website is MariaGillan.com.
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