A Review of 'Celebrating Calabria. Writing Heritage and Memory'

In a journal review by Wanda Balzano, Wake Forest University, (Rubbettino, 2020. Pp. 176) of Celebrating Calabria. Writing Heritage and Memory, edited by Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Margherita Ganeri, the author says of Maria Mazziotti Gillan's poetry:

The attachment to the Italian language was lost due to the anxieties of integration in the new world(s), and, with it, the loss of traditions and rituals became unavoidable. Bella Dicks explains how this kind of storytelling represents, on the one hand, the sense of moving freely and forward into the future, but, on the other, it is “about righting a sense of wrong: rectifying a nagging feeling of abandonment, misrepresentation or a lack of recognition.”

For instance, Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s poetry, prominently positioned in this collection, expresses excitement at the color-changing and soul-opening Calabrese landscape of mountains and sea (“This morning on the terrace at Albidona/...I look out over the olive trees.../spread out before me like an abstract painting”, as well as a moving understanding of how her former self as a sixteen-year-old girl tried too hard to conform to a culture that silenced her own (“So many years have passed since that photograph/in the dress that was pale blue,/and it took me years/to realize it was covering the bright

red spirit inside me.”

This book is the result of the “Italian Diaspora Studies Writing Seminar” that took place in May 2019, in Calabria and Basilicata. The program was launched by the Italian Diaspora Studies Association, in conjunction with the Department of Humanities at the University of Calabria, with the support of the U.S. Consulate General of Naples, and the patronages of the Canadian Embassy of Rome and the Italian Cultural Institute of Montreal (CA). The program was aimed at establishing a broad transnational perspective on the Italian diaspora through a community-based writing program, characterized by the mission of focusing on the South of Italy and on the importance of material culture and of historical heritage that can be experienced only by visiting specific locales of the diaspora. 

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Maria Mazziotti Gillan's newest poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (2021). Other recent publications are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow, and the poetry collections What Blooms in Winter and The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets, a pairing of her poems with her paintings.
Maria's artist website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.