In this essay, "Frail and Ferocious As a Sparrow: The Poetry of Maria Mazziotti Gillan," by Dante Di Stefano, he looks at Maria Mazziotti Gillan's poetry as a powerful expression of love, healing, and transformation. Her simple yet profound style rebukes avant-garde complexity, instead offering accessible and emotive verse that resonates deeply with readers.
An excerpt:
"Taken as a whole, Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s poetry obsessively confronts her experience of coming to terms with her hyphenated identity and her working class origins. In a sense, her body of work consists of one poem, “Growing Up Italian,” written over and over again. “Growing Up Italian” emblematizes the techniques and preoccupations that run throughout her poetry. As the poet Joe Weil has noted, Mazziotti Gillan’s poems aspire to the aria; and like the aria, each poem needs to be considered as part of an operatic whole. These poems are her biancheria, her embroidery work, homespun, artful, delicate, her dowry for future generations. Each poem represents a Whitmanesque attempt to chronicle her own American journey as the daughter of Italian immigrants. This journey takes her away from, and returns her to, the “dark foreign self” she initially hated as a schoolgirl. This is the story of how the young girl whose first poem was published in St. Anthony’s Messenger went on to become an internationally recognized poet and professor. For Mazziotti Gillan, the processes of assimilation into the mainstream American middle class are convoluted and nuanced, fraught with peril and freighted with meaning. Her work constantly retraces the streets of Paterson, New Jersey, and yet the hills of her ancestral home in San Mauro, Italy haunt even her earliest poems. Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s body of work resists the coming of age narrative that it often asserts. Mazziotti Gillan’s work also explicitly rejects the assimilation narrative that is often puts forth; in fact, Gillan’s poetry challenges fixed notions of American-ness by dramatizing the processes of remembrance so important to the construction of identity in traditional Italian-American families. Mazziotti Gillan’s ultimate subject, therefore, is the remembering self.
Although Mazziotti Gillan’s poems often alternate between contemplating love and loss, grief and joy, pride and shame, these emotional tropes merely provide the backdrop for her exploration of how the mind and the heart constitute themselves in any given act of recollection. In this sense, her poetic project runs parallel to the English Romantics, particularly Wordsworth. Also, like William Blake, Maria Gillan would agree that “a tear is an intellectual thing.” The intellect and the emotions overlap and intermingle in all of her poetry. Sorrow becomes a hypothesis. Hope, a theorem. Desire, an ecstatic deduction. To fully represent the limits and depths of memory Mazziotti Gillan blurs the boundaries between feeling and reasoning. In her poem, “Thinking About the Intricate Pathways of the Brain.” Gillan writes of a snail shell that she holds in her palm:
I think if you could travel into it
deep enough, if you could take that journey
to the center, you’d discover
the witches waiting
with their chants and runes,
but if we gave them names,
they’d be able to escape,
like all the fears of which we are ashamed
and all the memories that lie
in the rabbit warrens
of the brain,
pathways that lead
to the witches with their
bags full of the past..."
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.
