Poem: The Most Dangerous Thing I Ever Did

Dante Di Stefano. writing for the Italian American Studies Association, published "Frail and Ferocious as a Sparrow: The Poetry of Maria Mazziotti Gillan." In that essay, he says: "Why are we so much more than we appear to be?” This sentence implies the solidarity created by living in a world where none of us can answer the poet’s question. 

He looks at Gillan's poem, "The Most Dangerous Thing I Ever Did,” from Ancestors’ Song, which he feels responds to this question particularly well. 

"Ancestors’ Song is perhaps Mazziotti Gillan’s finest collection, and this particular poem exemplifies the poet’s project of dramatizing the remembering self. The poem follows roughly the narrative arc described in “Growing Up Italian,” as Gillan charts her journey from ignorance through knowledge of difference, to self-hatred culminating in the desire to blend in, and ending in the realization of the beauty and of the permanence of the Italian-American identity she sought to erase. The poem reads:

At Eastside High School, most of the Jewish

girls had their noses done, all of us wanting to erase

any hint of ethnicity or race. I envied those girls, so bright

and competent, those girls who could afford to change

their noses into proper American noses and not the ethnic

noses we were born wearing. As soon as I started to work

after college, I paid for a Master’s degree and when I got

my first college teaching job, I decided I was going to have my

nose done. I made an appointment with a plastic surgeon, told

him what I wanted, and he told me what day to report

to the hospital and I signed myself in. I was terrified that

my parents would find out and kill me, but I went through

with it anyway. On the operating table, I heard the doctor say,

“We’re going to give her a perfect nose,” and then, I swear, I heard

him break the bone in my nose. When I woke up I had bandages

over my nose and two enormous black eyes. I was in the hospital

two days and then I called home and told my mother

that I had fallen on the road and hit the curb in the college town,

where the conference was held and where I had never been.

As with all lies, my story was perhaps a little too elaborate.

I think my mother guessed, but my father would have killed me,

so she didn’t tell him anything. Instead, she nursed me back

to health, bringing me chicken soup, toast and tea. When my cousin

came to visit, she said, “Oh, your nose looks the same to me.” I knew

she was saying it to make me feel that my hooked nose had not changed

at all, but I was happy to be rid of it, to have become American

or so I thought. Years later, I am ashamed of my willingness to erase

that nose, so large and unmistakable, for this ordinary, inoffensive

nose, this American nose, my hooked nose, always there

on the inside, always Italian, always mine.

DiStefano continues: "Why are we so much more than we appear to be? The poem answers that we are much more than we appear to be because we are underwritten with cultural legacies that are as indelible as the ghost of Gillan’s hooked Italian nose. This poem enacts the breathlessness of remembering through the torrent of conjunctions it employs. The rhetorical device of polysyndeton magnifies the overwhelming rush of memory in the lines: 'I was in the hospital / two days and then I called home and told my mother / that I had fallen on the road and hit the curb in the college town, / where the conference was held and where I had never been.'

The poem’s resolution is once again contingent upon Gillan’s confrontation with shame and her rejection of the melting pot as a viable symbol in her narrative of the American experience. In this poem, the hooked nose she surgically erased is the true American nose. Significantly, the poet becomes American by remaining Italian, as the poem underscores in its concluding moment by praising: “this American nose, my hooked nose, always there/ on the inside, always Italian, always mine.”

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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.

Living With Loss: Maria Gillan's 'The Silence in the Empty House'

Anna Citrino, on her blog, Poetry, Place, Pilgrimage, wrote about "Living with Loss" and finds comfort and insight in Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s book of poems, The Silence in an Empty House. Citrino describes it as "a beautiful book of poems describing experiences in her relationship with her life partner, who had a terminal illness. While experiencing the territory of loss, the writing takes the reader into the heart of a relationship and the many small moments and memories that build and connect one life to another in intricate interweaving."

Citrino's post, "Living with Loss," is excerpted here:

"In her poem, 'Watching the Bridge Collapse,” Gillan describes how life can change in ways never expected.

We loved each other. Our children were
smart and healthy and beautiful. How could we lose?
then one day you, who could swim a hundred laps
in the town pool, who ran even in a mid-winter
snowstorm, began to move slower and slower,
your hands no longer functioning the way
they always had, your legs unwilling to obey
your brain’s command. And now, your head bent
sideways, so it nearly touches your shoulder,
your legs so weak they cannot hold you up,
your voice thin as a thread.

The situation Gillan describes is excruciatingly difficult. We acknowledge age brings diminishment, but to witness the vitality of one you love slowly decline in so painful a manner is a loss no one hopes for. Nevertheless, the poems show Gillan confronting the loss and suffering day after day, although there is no possibility for expectation that her husband’s condition will improve. This is a struggle any of us could find ourselves in. As Gillan later points out in her poem, “What is Lost,” we do not know what our future will hold. “We all believe that if we just do what we’re supposed to/ the world will remain firm beneath our feet,” she writes. But this isn’t how it is for many people, and one of the things I especially appreciate about Gillan’s poems in this volume is how she describes her losses so directly. In the poem “My Daughter Comes Home to Take Care of Her Sick Father,” Gillan speaks openly about the difficulty of her situation. “I do not understand,” she writes, “how love could become so complicated./ I am ashamed that some part of me wants this to end, to just/ stop.” Her honesty about her struggle in coming to terms with what she has been given is powerful and moving because the story she tells is bigger than simply her own personal story. It’s the story of all who struggle against things that seem unbearable. She speaks the words that are nearly impossible to find when the burden of loss is so enormous it lies beyond the ability to name.

When someone we love finds themselves struggling under difficult circumstances, it’s natural to want to offer help and solutions. Yet sometimes there are no solutions. When her husband tells her of his fear of being blind in the poem, “Because You Keep Turning to Me,” Gillan writes, “I offer what comfort I can, and when I hang up, I cry/in my hotel bed because you keep turning to me/ and all I have to offer is my hands, useless and empty, and too far away to even stroke your head.” I read her words and recognize my own emptiness in trying to meet the loss I sense in others around me who are suffering. Gillan extends her expression of the depth of our incompleteness in such circumstances in her poem, “There is No Way to Begin.”

“There is no way to begin this poem, to say how I who have
always believed that whatever happens, things always
work out for the best, have finally been brought
to my knees, not to pray as I did in Blessed Sacrament
Church on Sixth Avenue when I was a girl, but in defeat,
unable to find the thread of joy that has always
waited for me just beyond tears.”

When we look at others’ suffering, we suffer too. The brain’s mirror neurons tell us this. One of Gillan’s poems, “Watching the Pelicans Die,” speaks directly to our interconnectedness, demonstrating so effectively how human suffering is reflected in the natural world as well. The drowning pelicans’ bodies caught in the BP oil spill are an echo of her husband’s painful effort to rise above the weight of the disease that wants to drown him. Oil covering its body, the bird in Gillan’s poem screams without sound, “a picture of torment and despair,” the silent despair Gillan recognizes her husband and family daily bear as they try to survive the calamity the disease has created–the suffering from which there seems no end.

…On the Gulf, the earth and sea
are being destroyed, just as you were by the disease that finally
defeated you after you struggled against it for all those years.
Some things are bigger than all of us. We cannot defeat
them. If there is enough carelessness and greed in the world
even the ocean can be destroyed…

Our life is intertwined with the life and suffering of the planet. Suffering continues, and so does the brave effort to meet it. “You never gave up,” Gillan writes in her poem of the same title, “you kept doing whatever you could do,/ fell each day because you’d try to walk even though/ you no longer could.” Spelling out an alphabet of loss as time passes, moments of sudden memories of beauty, but also the months and years of loneliness and the long process of letting go, letting things be what they are. “The world is too full of grief,” she writes in her poem “Planting Flowers in Iraq,” a poem about a groundskeeper planting flowers when the very same week two hundred people were killed by car bombs, and Gillan recalls a mother’s face overcome with grief as she lifted her dead child in her arms. “The world is too full of grief,” Gillan writes.

It’s true. The pulse of loss throbs inside the silence. Everywhere one looks, tears and sorrow wait beneath the surface of things. I think of the 9/11 memorial designed by architect Michael Arad and landscape architect Peter Walker, where once the Twin Towers stood in New York City. An immense sense of loss envelops you as you approach the memorial, then stand to look as water pours its delicate and silvery life over the square’s edges into the firm earth, then falls again endlessly and forever into a bottomless space that cannot be fathomed, seen, or known. The grief feels utterly palpable and weighted with presence, moving beyond words into a space where grief lives and doesn’t end. This is grief embodied.

How do we get to the other side of grief? How do we live beyond, into or with loss that feels too immense to bear? How do we find a way to name the grief, to hold it and still keep living? In her poem, “What if?” Gillan writes,

And what if, this moment, wrapped in the gauze shawl
of stillness, is the secret after all, to learn to look
more closely at the varied world, the veins of a leaf,
a stone, the stippled pattern of bark, and to find,
even in the shape of our hands, the curve of our nails
the ability to lift a cup and drink, the secret of loving
the transfigured world?

An answer is to learn to look, and where Gillan turns her gaze is to nature. Nature, too, has experienced enormous and unspeakable losses, especially in the past few centuries, but life is still present, available to us as a renewing source when we look deeply. Tree and stone, our own hands lifting a cup to drink. From the transfigured world, we can drink and draw new life. As Gillan points out, it is when we allow ourselves to be wrapped in the “gauze shawl of stillness” that we enable ourselves to connect to the commonplace of the world in its transfigured form. This, in turn, allows us to see our experience as part of a greater whole."

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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 along with some of her paintings is The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets . Maria's official website is MariaGillan.com.

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Becoming Visible

In the essay, "Becoming Visible: Personal and Collective Histories in Susan Caperna Lloyd and Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s Documentary Films," by Elisabetta Marino, the author examines how a film about Maria expands on the reading of her poetry.

EXCERPT

"Writers and artists Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Susan Caperna Lloyd have captured this struggle in their multi-faceted work, forcefully portraying their alienation, the self-erasure that often came with trying to succeed in America, as well as their proud assertion of their ethnic identity. This essay sets out to investigate the ways they both used documentary films—The Baggage (2001) and All That Lies between Us (2007)—as a means to restore visibility, reclaim complexity, and give voice to the Italian American experience...

All That Lies Between Us, a 55-minute documentary film by Kevin Carey and Mark  Hillringhouse,  shares  its  title  with  the  poetry  collection  Maria  Mazziotti  Gillan  published  in  2007.  It  visually  complements  the  volume,  which  explores  various themes, such as personal and collective family memories, broader reflec-tions on the future in its continuity with the past, and the intention of embracing one’s  fragility,  transforming  it  into  strength,  while  exorcising  fears  and  frustrat-ing feelings of inadequacy. Both Mazziotti Gillan’s artistic output and Carey and Hillringhouse’s  documentary  film  compellingly exemplify what Mary Jo Bona  refers to when emphasizing  the  capacity  for  resistance  among  some  American  writers of Italian origin, “engaged in making visible the fact that Italian Ameri-cans exist contrary to their own tendencies towards self-negation and subscription to an outmoded dependence on the cultural code of silence: omertà”

Watch the documentary

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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.

Finding Ourselves and the Poetry of Maria Mazziotti Gillan

Poet Anna Citrino has written an online essay, "Finding Ourselves and the Poetry of Maria Mazziotti Gillan." 

The essay begins"
"While looking for new ideas for teaching poetry this past week, I discovered a wonderful writer, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, an Italian American poet whose poetry recreates scenes with such vivid detail that you are literally inside the setting with her, living what it is she relates. In her poem, “My Daughter at 14: Christmas Dance,” Gillan puts the reader directly into the scene and the mind of a mother’s discussion with her daughter about her daughter’s experience at a dance. You feel the tension the mother experiences in wanting to support her daughter as at age 14, she learns to navigate emotions and relationships. While reading, you’re firmly aware of the difficulty and tension the mother experiences as she walks the line between affirming and cautioning her daughter..."

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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.

Poem: What is This Absence in the Heart?

In a recent article by Carla Francellini, "What is This Absence in the Heart? - L'inedito di Maria Mazziotti Gillan," the author analyzes Maria Mazziotti Gillan's unpublished poem "What is This Absence in the Heart?" in the context of her abundant and generous lyrical production, taking into account the most relevant critical studies at the moment. 

One of the most prolific Italian/American poets, Gillan dedicates this unpublished poem to her relationship with her son, John. The poem sheds light on Gillan's most intimate production, rather than her more familiar poems about her long-lasting search for her ethnic identity.

Carla Francellini is a researcher in the Dipartimento di Filologia e Critica delle Letterature Antiche e Moderne at the University of Siena in Italy. 

What Is This Absence in the Heart?

So much that is broken or lost,

so much that we can never get back.

In memory, you still lean into the circle 

of my arm, lean your heavy head 

against my chest.

I read a book to you. You are two years old, 

in your flannel pajamas, getting ready to sleep, 

you will keep on asking for another book 

and then another. During the day you sit

in the wicker clothes basket playing with Matchbox cars 

or turning the pages in a book that you can’t read 

but have already memorized.  

So many hours between then and now.

So much that is broken or lost.

Your voice on the phone tells me how you are, 

though you no longer tell me.

We are so alike, you and I, that I know

the sound of your voice when you’re unhappy,

the tightness in it, the tense tone,

the heaviness of it, weighing you down 

as though you were carrying stones in your pocket, 

and how it leaves me afraid for you,

leaves me struggling for words to erase your sorrow.

I wish I could carry us both back to those days  

when I held you in my arms and where there was 

always something I could do to help you - 

not like now when the distance between us 

can be counted in more than miles. 

We both know you need to take care of everyone, 

to fix what is broken in those you love, 

in this way we are alike, and that is the one thing 

you cannot bear to know.

      - Maria Mazziotti Gillan

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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.

Praise for 'When the Stars Were Still Visible'

"For the Stars Over Paterson" [a review by Dante Di Stefano published online at bestamericanpoetry.com of When the Stars Were Still Visible by Maria Mazziotti Gillan (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2021)

Excerpts from the review:

...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.

In the title poem, Mazziotti Gillan writes:

So many memories swirl
like bits of color in a kaleidoscope,
and so impossible to explain.

To full expression’s kaleidoscopic impossibility, Mazziotti Gillan holds up hundreds of shards of specific memories as shining and tightly-packed as the silver balls her Zio Guillermo made from the foil inside his Camel cigarette packs.

The poems that stand out the most in When the Stars Were Still Visible are the ones that either fill in an as yet poetically underexamined corner of the poet’s autobiography or feel like a resolution to a part of the poet’s autobiography that has supplied the material for many earlier poems. “Taking my Brother to the Barber” provides an example of the former kind of poem. In this poem, a sibling relationship spanning more than seventy-five years spirals out in a bittersweet aria ending on the brother’s huge dark uncomplaining eyes. 

“My Son the Lawyer Quotes Dylan Thomas to Give Me Courage” provides an example of the latter kind of poem. In poems from previous volumes, such as “Is This the Way It Is Between Mothers and Sons?” from All that Lies Between Us, Mazziotti Gillan has explored the distance between an adult son and aging mother. However, in “My Son the Lawyer Quotes Dylan Thomas…” the distance collapses as the son reaches out to encourage his mother using the lines of the Welsh poet’s most famous villanelle. Just as many of her poems end in uplift, “My Son the Lawyer…” resolves (in uplift) the mother-son story arc that runs throughout her body of work.

...She is singing. As she says in the poem “Last May in San Mauro, Cilento, 2017”: "I hold the memories close to give me comfort when I am most afraid.” Reading her work, I feel less afraid of aging and what comes after. I feel her warmth. I hear her singing. I see the stars over Paterson. What else could a reader ask for?

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Maria Mazziotti Gillan's new 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 which pairs her poems with her paintings. Maria's artist's website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.

Review: What They Bring: The Poetry of Migration and Immigration

What They Bring: The Poetry of Migration and Immigration

Edited and with Introduction by Irene Willis and Jim Haba (IP Books, 2020)

Reviewed by Charlotte Mandel

​With this new anthology, aptly titled What They Bring: The Poetry of Migration and Immigration, Editors Irene Willis and Jim Haba remind us how dearly each of us interconnects with every other human being, regardless of physical or cultural differences. 

The reader is seized immediately by words well known, such as “the tempest-tossed” of Emma Lazarus giving voice to the Statue of Liberty; Pastor Martin Niemoller's heart-rending “Then they came for me”; heard suddenly in the context of today's world.  Re-reading such familiar poems taken for granted as part of our literary American experience, is profoundly affecting. We recall W. H. Auden (“Refugee Blues”) along with new poems by living poets such as Martin Espada, Alicia Ostriker, Michael Waters, Marie Howe, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, and Claudia Rankine.

​What They Bring offers insights that can change your life, as with Alberto Rios' poem “A House Called Tomorrow”: 

​You are not fifteen, or twelve, or seventeen—

​You are a hundred wild centuries

​And fifteen, bringing with you

​In every breath and in every step

​Everyone that has come before you. . .

Similarly, the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai states “. . . the migration of my parents / Has not subsided in me.” 

​Indeed, perceptions brought into consciousness cannot be erased. Unlike the way we may surf the TV, or rattle the newspaper towards an op-ed page, this anthology penetrates and advises—pay attention! 

​The editors have worthily included poems of their own, such as Jim Haba's keen understanding of what immigrants bring to our “children's children's children.”  In “Border” Irene Willis writes of reading news of a hungry child left at the border while eating breakfast.

​Several poems take us directly into life experiences of refugees—the permanent feelings of outsider status, the sense of enduring insult. In “A Girl Tying Ribbons in Her Hair” Charlotte Gould Warren writes, “As a child, you learn to keep your pain buried.” In “A Machine for Remembering” Justin Ahren reveals, “I've known my whole life / the barbed wire / behind which I was born.” A. E. Stallings “Refugee Fugue” and Erica Jong's “Child on the Beach” remind us of the heartbreaking image of a drowned toddler face down on shore.

​Outsider status can permeate the sensibility of an American born child of immigrants. 

Maria Mazziotti Gillan's “I Was the Girl Who Never Spoke,” tells of fear that her pronunciation
would show
where I come from
where I belong
where I can never go.

​Reading these poems I have not only gained insight into others' lives, but also been educated into the weight of language, as through Rafael Campo's “In English That Is Spanish”:  

​. . .immortality 

​Is really only going back in time

​Through languages like fourth dimensions, rhymes

​Like clocks to when we were a single race. . .

​I can think of no more necessary book to appear in this dramatic era of global connection alongside elements of divisiveness at play in our own country. We must be grateful to editor-poets Irene Willis and Jim Haba, for bringing us these poems to be read and re-read.

To answer the question implied in the title, what do these immigrants bring?  Humanity, compassion, skills, and an enriched nation. As a reader, I have been profoundly touched by the unforgettable voices heard in these poems.  

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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 artist's website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.

A Review of 'Paterson Light and Shadow' and 'What Blooms in Winter'

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.

Perhaps by this point Maria Gillan does not need an introduction to a North American Italian reading audience. She has published more than twenty books of poems, has been the mentor for hundreds of poets through her writing seminars at Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College and at Binghamton Center for Writers where she is professor of English at Binghamton University, SUNY.

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.

In other poems she addresses a familiar theme in all her poetry: her struggles as the daughter of working-class immigrant parents, who spoke Italian-accented English, and growing up in an America at the time that did not honor difference. There was no prefix “multi” attached to culture in America. She lived between two worlds. The titles of her poems suggest the conflict: "The Clothes I Wore in High School,"  "At the Factory Where My Mother Worked," " I Was a Good Italian Girl,"  "Bell Bottoms and Platform Shoes," "Bookbags and Galoshes" and others.

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.

          

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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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Books to Help You Write Poetry

In the article, "Want To Write Poetry? Start With These 9 Books," Kristian Wilson has included 9 books to help writers at all levels further their work as poets.

Included is Writing Poetry to Save Your Life: How to Find the Courage to Tell Your Stories  which is noted as being "Part memoir, part writing reference, Maria Mazziotti Gillan's Writing Poetry to Save Your Life is a conversational guide to the process of writing poetry and all its highs and lows."

Also included are perennial favorites such as The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux, and A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver.

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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 along with some of her paintings is The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets . Maria's official website is MariaGillan.com.

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Silence in an Empty House and Ancestors’ Song

Looking back at two earlier collections by Maria Mazziotti Gillan that were reviewed in L'Italo-Americano by Ken Scambray, author and professor of English at the University of La Verne. 

The word that comes to mind when reading Gillan’s two most recent books of poems is prolific. After nineteen books, including the two under review and the co-editor of four anthologies, she has established herself as an unassailable voice in contemporary American poetry. The fifty-eight poems in Silence in an Empty House are an extended elegy to her late husband, Dennis.

Faced with the silence of an empty house after her husband’s death, Gillan confronts the challenges of absence and living alone after a marriage that lasted over four decades. Courage is another of those words that describe Gillan’s poems. She writes with a confessional openness that exceeds an earlier generation of American confessional poets, such as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, among others.

In the opening poem of the volume, "When We Were Engaged," she writes that when she and her husband were first engaged, she had to overcome her fear of heights and ride a rollercoaster so that she, the daughter of Italian immigrants, did not seem weak and vulnerable before her “handsome and middle-class fiancé.”

In "Kitchen in the House on Kenwood Road," she writes of the first years of her long marriage. As a young wife, it was a time when she had tried to balance both her domestic role as a woman of the 1950s with her aspirations to be a professional and college teacher. But as she says, she finally “gave in” and assumed that traditional role prescribed for women of the era. As she reflects on those early years with her now deceased husband, she writes that they had so much yet to learn about who they were and where their lives were going. Little did either realize what fate held for them. The sinister disease ultimately overtook him, rendering her lover, friend, and traveling companion virtually helpless. She writes of his physical pain and her emotional grief as she watches, helplessly, the progress of the disease.

As a university teacher and renowned poet, her professional life often took her out of the house for days. Gillan gives her readers a window into her guilt and anxiety over leaving her husband with caretakers. But there was little she could do to turn the clock back to that stay-at-home mother of her early years.

In the last section of the book, The Loneliness That Lives, she confronts with unabashed honesty the loneliness that she now faces. Gillan looks back at Dennis’ heroic struggle against the progress of the disease. At odd moments, she is reminded of his struggle when she sees a dead deer on the side of the road. Her confrontation of life’s process is both honest and painful. At 3am. in the morning, she writes, “I am talking to your ashes and asking/for the forgiveness I should have asked for when you /were still alive. . . “ But that opportunity is now lost.

But in the final section of The Silence, entitled, Getting Ready to Stand, it is clear that Gillan is ready to go on, to confront life’s challenges. She sees that same drive in her lovely, college professor daughter that has fueled her own success as a poet and teacher over the last forty years. There is hope and a future. She writes of her own success as a poet when she is given a prestigious award. In "What Animals Teach Us," she sees a mirror image of all of us in our efforts to make our newborns stand, take that first step away, and enter life without us. As she says, animals “teach us how to care for one another.” In "The Bear Hunt in New Jersey," she rails against an official hunt designed to kill bears in New Jersey because there are too many of them, but never, she says, are there ever “too many people, too many houses.”

In "When the Christmas Cactus Blooms," she writes of her rebirth, that very human ability to find beauty in life, “so full of grief and loss.” She sees cactus blooms and apostrophizes to Dennis, “I am so certain/that you sent me the amazing blooms of the cactus as a reminder/of all those sweet years we had together.” She ends her poem and the book, “only now, am I ready/to let go of your hand.”

In Ancestors’ Song, Gillan writes again of her years growing up Italian American in a working class family in New Jersey. She writes about those simple pleasures of a working-class family: summer evenings playing gin rummy under her father’s grape arbor, a glass of lemonade, the aroma of tangerines, and “fireflies that circled us like tiny falling stars.”

She writes of her shyness as a young girl, a familiar theme in her other books, her first bicycle ride, and her Anglicizing her first name, from Maria to Mary, so she would fit in among her American friends at school. In her aspirations to be an American girl, she dreams of meeting Elvis Presley and riding a Harley with James Dean. Among these memories, she is reminded yet of the loss of her husband and the toll life takes. In "Why Is It When I Think of You," she recalls a time on a New York street corner with [her husband] Dennis. Nostalgia intersected with reality.

In the final poem in the volume, she writes of her mother’s birthplace, a small mountain village in Southern Italy. Gillan had the great honor some years ago to visit the village and read her poems. Her reading attracted scores of people, not just from the village, but from the surrounding area.

for one moment in these southern Italian mountains
I could almost be one of the enormous butterflies
that light on the flowers and fly off,
so weightless am I and happy...
I feel welcomed in the place,
as though my mother and father were here with me,
leading me home.

Through all the pain and grief, Gillan is sustained by her connectedness to the people who surround her, past and present. Her memories of her husband, her parents, her children, and finally her heritage in that Southern Italian village give her the strength to overcome the omnipresent sadness of her husband’s passing. What we learn from her poems is that grief need not cancel out the beauty of a blooming cactus or the joy of returning to an ancestral village where she rediscovers that sense of belonging which transcends time and place.          

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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 along with some of her paintings is The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets . Maria's official website is MariaGillan.com.

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A Celebration in Poems and Paintings

A review of Maria Gillan's 2015 collection The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets by Ken Scambray that appears on ItaloAmericano.org.

After eighteen books of poems, two national book awards, and an outstanding Community Service in Literature award, Maria Gillan has reinvented herself as a painter. The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets is a collection of her poems accompanied by her expressive water color and mixed media paintings.

Her poems are on familiar themes that run throughout her poetry: growing up Italian in New Jersey at mid-century, family, women’s roles, marriage, mortality, and love. The glue that holds the paintings and the poems together is Gillan’s ever-evolving imagination. Two years ago when she was in California on a reading tour, she explained to me and Carole, my wife, over dinner one evening that she had begun painting again, after a hiatus of many years. At first she said she felt tentative working in a new art form, until someone said to her, “Just paint what you feel, the way you write your poems.”

In one of her poems she writes about an old family photograph of herself and her two siblings. There she is, she writes “my eyes wide open and sparkling. I’m not pretty, but I look / electric, like I can’t wait to move, to get on with it, my energy / palpable even in a photograph.” That’s the sense that I had when I began turning the pages of The Girls: that I was in the presence of a poet and now an artist overflowing with energy and who is naturally compelled to create, to keep getting on with it no matter where the heart takes her.

There is a synergy between her impressionistic paintings and poems. The facial expressions, especially their eyes, of the many women in the paintings tell a similar story to that in the poems. In  "Seventh Grade," the chartreuse jacket becomes one of those American signs that Gillan, as the dark-skinned Italian school girl from New Jersey, believed would transform her into a real American girl, making her sexy and attractive to those boys in leather jackets who hung out on Paterson’s street corners.

She describes Paterson where she grew up as the city of dreams, where the immigrant children who lived there dreamed one day of rising above their poor, working-class neighborhood. In The City of Dreams: Paterson, NJ, as a famous poet, she returns to give a reading.

She is confronted by her own mortality when an old friend shows up for the reading. Gillan does not recognize him. Time had not been kind to him. But Gillan’s imagination resists the onslaught of time. “In the city of dreams,” she writes, “no one dies.” In her imagination, nothing has changed: somewhere out of sight she imagines that children are still playing in the streets and Zio’s tomato plants are still growing. The poem is reminiscent of her painting of the three blond-haired Women with Starry Eyes and another Girls Playing Dress-up, bright-eyed dreamers forever reinventing themselves.

As a girl, Gillan writes in "Cheap Shoes" that her mother made her wear those clunky Buster Brown shoes instead of the “ballerina slippers” that all the other girls wore at school. Her mother reasoned that they had more support and were better for her feet. In her immigrant household, practicality would always trump personal wishes. But as a thoughtful, now successful adult, Gillan does not fault her mother.

In "My Mother’s Tough Love," her mother would come to her house when Gillan was at work and clean and wash. Her mother was appalled that so much has changed in society with her working daughter that she now leaves her house and clothing in such disarray. Never resentful, Gillan understood the source of her mother’s criticism. But what could she do? When she went to her mother’s house, her mother offered her food and coffee, and she sat silently holding her mother’s hand. Her mother would tell her, “Cry, cry, it will be good for you.” In the watercolor Woman in Emerald Dress, the dark-haired woman appears dignified and composed, the pensive gaze of her firm blue eyes suggesting that she is someone who has an understanding of experience, both of what is gained and lost in a successful life.

Next to the painting The First Time I Got Drunk is the opposite Gillan, a careless young woman who is beguiled by a handsome young man at a bar one night and has too many whiskey sours. She remembers little of the night, not even the boy’s name. The persona’s shameful behavior contrasts with that sheltered school girl from Paterson, who wanted so dearly to be sexy, but did not seem to understand the perils of growing up and away from that cloistered Italian American household with its rigid boundaries, especially for women. The women in her paintings, with their thoughtful faces and always expressive eyes, all seem to understand the complexity of growing older, from Pensive Woman with Roses, Women in Japanese Robes, to Woman at a Garden Party and Forties Woman. They are mature, thoughtful women engaged in life.

But there is more than cautionary warnings in Gillan’s poems and the paintings. Though as a professional she has moved beyond that working-class home where she grew up, her persona in her poems always in some form honors her mother’s generation. From the outset of her career as a poet, Gillan has always in some form celebrated her girlhood in Paterson, regardless of the humiliation that she sometimes faced as the Italian American other among her classmates. In "We Used to Play Scrabble," Gillan writes, “I remember those evenings sweet and perfect.” In "Jersey Diners," she writes lamentably that “only from a distance do we know how protected / we were, how we’d mourn the passage of time.” The passage of time includes as well the death of her husband from Parkinson’s disease.

But despite the sense of loss that runs consistently throughout her poetry, the conflict between that Italian American life in Paterson and her successful, modern self has always been the well-spring of Gillan’s creativity.

In "My Granddaughter at Nineteen," her granddaughter, who significantly likes to wear “vintage clothing, on the “exterior” is both “cool and fun,” but on the “interior” is serious, to the point of alienating young men at college. Somehow the thoughtfulness of the grandmother and great grandmother has been mysteriously transferred to the granddaughter. The past is present, but in an altered, creative form: that vintage clothing.

Women Around the Kitchen Table

In the paintings, Women Around the Kitchen Table, Women and Doves, Women with Starry Eyes, Woman with Pink Dress and Flowers, and Woman in Blue Hat and Butterflies, there is a celebration of womanhood, their collectivity and connectivity.

In "My Mother Had No Cookbooks," she writes of her return to her mother’s village in Southern Italy, San Mauro, where there she finds the same dishes that her mother prepared in Paterson.

...Ah, my mother was an artist, San Mauro in each movement
of hands, San Mauro in homemade bread, San Mauro in polenta
steaming in its bowl, San Mauro in stuffed artichokes, San Mauro
in ragù with tomatoes she canned each summer...

She celebrates her connection to her Southern Italian heritage that has always been present in her life through her mother’s artistry in the kitchen, a creativity impossible to reproduce, certainly not in a cookbook.

The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets is a celebration in poems and paintings, in words and colors, of women’s lives, not their social roles but their less obvious interior lives, their compassion, empathy, humanity, and even ambivalence. In Gillan’s poems, the passage of time is at best problematic, but a look back at her past reveals the community of immigrant women who made her success possible. Boundaries were never barriers, not when the imagination is set free. Gillan just writes and paints what she feels.


Reviewed by Ken Scambray latest book is Queen Calafia’s Paradise: California and the Italian American Novel. He is also the author A Varied Harvest: The Life and Works of Henry Blake Fuller, The North American Italian Renaissance: Italian Writing in America and Canada, and Surface Roots: Stories.

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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 along with some of her paintings is The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets . Maria's official website is MariaGillan.com.

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Poetry Floats Against the Current of Time: A Review of 'Paterson Light and Shadow'

Paterson Light and Shadow, with poems by Maria Mazziotti Gillan and photographs by Mark Hillringhouse (Serving House Books, 2017) was reviewed by Adele Kenny in the Fall 2017 issue of the Tiferet  journal.


"It’s been said that poetry floats against the current of time, and this stunningly beautiful book by Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Mark Hillringhouse shows—through written language and photography—just how true that statement is. More than observation or remembrance, this book is both a tribute to, and a celebration of, Paterson, New Jersey. Both Gillan and Hillringhouse have lived and taught in Paterson, have walked and wandered through big and little spaces in the place once known as the Silk City. Together, they capture the light and the shadow of Paterson, past and present.

Maria Gillan is one of American poetry’s first ladies. Her work is always warmly and touchingly human, her voice authentic. Her style is essentially narrative with strong lyric undertones. Skillfully compressed and perfectly crafted, Gillan’s poems are filled with the generosity of spirit for which she is known. With adeptness of image and syntax, the poems in this collection are both thoughtful and elegant; they are driven by the author’s observations of life and her reflections on losses and love, all underscored by commitment to the particular. Technically impressive and filled with inner music, these poems rise from deep emotional centers and, as always, move between past and present with sureness and understanding. Keenly observant and fully aware of human frailty, Gillan raises her ghosts and, through them, she documents the struggles and joys of life as it was and as it is now. Most importantly, deceptively simple straightforwardness is the genius of great poetry, and Maria Gillan is a genius.

Creating structural and tonal nuance through black and white photography requires both artistic and technical brilliance. Mark Hillringhouse is brilliant. A poet, essayist, and photographer whose works have been widely published and exhibited, he articulates time’s passage through subtle shades of meaning, feeling, and tone in his black and white photographs. In these images, texture and patterns are not distracted by color and are thus profoundly compelling. In the same way that Gillan controls and directs her work through image and emotion that is never overly stated, Hillringhouse incorporates varying tones of gray to create small subtleties that add up to maximum effect.

Gillan is a master of line and stanza breaks. She also excels in creating enjambments (continuing sentences from one poetic line to another without a pause or terminal punctuation) such as those seen in these lines from “Opening the Door: 19th Street, Paterson”:

The crumbling cement steps led down to the dark cave
of the cellar where the mouse traps waited
in the corners and the big, iron coal furnace squatted
next to the coal bin. My father used a shovel
to scoop the coal out: it made a scraping sound... (page 42)

Hillringhouse, too, is a master of line. The image opposite “Opening the Door: 19th Street, Paterson” (page 43), shows the front of a home. What strikes the viewer immediately is the crumbling cement staircase, which perfectly matches Gillan’s first line. Run-down, shabby, the short staircase presents a narrow construction that draws attention to the center. From there, Hillringhouse uses lines to invite the viewer’s eye to move about the image and not become fixed in one place. He skillfully captures the lines of the door, windows, steps, railing, and fence.There is a constant play of light against darkness in the poems and photographs that speaks to
life’s dual nature; and the poem/picture juxtapositions created by Gillan and Hillringhouse are extraordinary. Especially striking are “Going to the Rivoli in Downtown Paterson” and the accompanying image.

...On Saturdays, after school, when I was a girl,
we’d take the bus downtown and we’d walk up and down
Main Street in and out of stores. We never bought anything,
but we liked wandering the aisles of Meyer Brothers,
spritzing ourselves with perfume, if we dared, and smelling
the leather purses we couldn’t afford. Then we’d retreat
to the Rivoli, to the elegance of the theater, to that moment
when they’d dim the lights and the movie would flash onto
the huge screen and we’d leave behind our ordinary lives
and enter the world of the film, a place where people lived
lives that were magical and glittering, a place
where people could have whatever they desired
and never have to count the costs. (pages 72-73)

The image that faces the poem is one of the ruined theater (page 73). Surrounded by darkness, a band of light enters through a doorway and falls on the rubble in places where seats once were. The starkness and desolation are underscored by that band of light, by the perspective achieved by the photographer, and by the prevailing sense of the lost “magical and glittering” to which the
poet refers.

Powered by love and buttressed by memory, these poems and images leave the reader/viewer with a feeling of loss and change that is a leitmotif throughout the book. Intensely focused and showing mastery of composition and form, texture and depth, the poems and images of people and place in this collection are thoughtful and intelligent, as well as rich in nuance and meaning. Together, Maria Gillan and Mark Hillringhouse have created a book that looks at the past through the lens of what we know and see today.

The poems and images in this book inform one another with a special tenderness that speaks of identity—both personal and geographic. They give even those who have never been to Paterson a personal and touching look at a city that, like so many American cities, has changed irrevocably. For all of us, there is a Paterson in our individual histories—a hometown, a place we shared with family members and friends, a city or town that we remember. Along with poignant poems and exquisite images, this book calls us back to the spiritual geographies that we call home."

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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 along with some of her paintings is The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets . Maria's official website is MariaGillan.com.

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A Review of 'Paterson Light and Shadow

Paterson Light and Shadow Poems
by Maria Mazziotti Gillan with photographs by Mark Hillinghouse (Serving House Books, 2017)

Reviewed by Dante di Stefano at blog.bestamericanpoetry.com

Paterson Light and Shadow pairs the poetry of the city’s finest living poet, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, with the arresting tonalities of Mark Hillringhouse’s photography. The conversation between Hillringhouse’s stirring black and white images and Mazziotti Gillan’s deeply moving autobiographical poems brings to life the vibrant history of one of the first cities of American poetry, birthplace of Allen Ginsberg and muse to William Carlos Williams.

In “December Dusk,” Mazziotti Gillan writes:

“A precariousness steals over things
at dusk when darkness bleeds the light away
and our shadows stretch their long fingers.” 

An exquisite precariousness steals over the graffitied factories, the abandoned boxing gyms, The Great Falls, the diners, the side streets, the public schools, the crumbling monuments, and the dilapidated stoops enshrined in the pages of this book.

For Hillringhouse and Mazziotti Gillan, Paterson is a place both haunted and sacred; at any moment the drab and ramshackle might give way to memory’s “dizzying panorama, luminous / and vast.”

Paterson Light and Shadow is a love note to an archetypal American place unfolding in the dialogue between word and image; to eavesdrop on the discussion between Mazziotti Gillan and Hillringhouse is to understand more deeply their charged and fortifying relationship to this remarkable city.

'Paterson Light and Shadow' Reviewed by Jennifer Martelli on Ovunque Siamo

Paterson Light and Shadow
by Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Mark Hillringhouse.

Reviewed by Jennifer Martelli on Ovunque Siamo - New Italian-American Writing

Black and white photography is a choreography of nuanced tone: the eye is drawn to the reflection of light, how it dances against the dark. Mark Hillringhouse’s photo, “Winter Falls,” depicts a cold, partially frozen river, barely mirroring the sky. The bare tree branches could be shadows. The falls, white-braided with deep gray, seem frozen in motion. The city –Paterson, New Jersey– is blurred in the background. It must be overcast or near nighttime: two white spots glow far away–headlights.

I could be watching a movie frame at “Big Joey’s house... on his father’s 16 mm projector” in Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s accompanying poem, “In the City of Dreams: Paterson, NJ.”

Paterson Light and Shadow, a collaborative homage to a city rendered in Mazziotti Gillan’s honest, unflinching poems and Hillringhouse’s stark yet gentle black and white photography, never shies away from the shadows of an aging, working-class city populated by generations of immigrants. The artists contrast the shadowy shame of an old-country heritage with light that exalts the ordinary.

In Mazziotti Gillan’s poem, “17th Street: Paterson, New Jersey,” the speaker’s parents –who embody the Italian immigrant experience and all of its nobility and anachronism– become part of the photographic landscape. Mazziotti Gillan writes:

...the open look on my father’s face, sparks flying from him in pleasure, my mother’s hand, delicate, the charm of those moments where I rested in the luminous circle of love.

Facing this prose poem is Hillringhouse’s “Passaic River Winter Tree Branches.” We are drawn to the center of the photograph–the center of the river–by a misty light. This is the deepest point of the river, where the light falls. Delicate and bare branches reach across the river, like arms.

Hillringhouse’s capturing of reflecting light–and of light reflecting is probably best seen in his photographs “Bendix Diner,” which depicts the inside of a vintage diner: stainless steel appliances, spotless counter top, glass bricks. The sunlight shines on surfaces, walls, those strips of metal around the faux-leather counter stools. Through the frosted windows we can see bare tree branches.

Mazziotti Gillan’s poem, “Jersey Diners,” speaks of this light: “ ...Looking back, I see our young faces / lit by the harsh diner lights.”  This is a poem mourning the inevitable passage of time, employing similar light and shadow techniques: "glory, and we, our faces still untouched by grief and loss / caught and framed in the diner’s windows."

The speaker’s parents embody the conflict of the first or second generation of immigrants: a love for this “protected/and safe” community and a deep shame. In her heart-breaking poem, “Daddy, We Called You,” Mazziotti Gillan addresses the contrast of both cultures. At home her father was “Papa//but outside again, you became Daddy.”

Mazziotti Gillan’s poem, like a Hillringhouse photograph, uses light and shadow to convey an emotional depth, “Papa, how you glowed in company light,/when the other immigrants/came to you for health..."

The father remains illuminated, even as the daughter, embarrassed, denies him:

You were waiting for the bus, the streetlight illuminating
your face. I pretended I did not see you,
let my boyfriend pull away, leaving you...
I was ashamed to have my boyfriend see you,
find out about your second shift work, your broken English.

The glowing circle the father creates in the home enables the poet the opportunity to find her voice.

 “Spruce Street Factory Warehouse with Figure” by Mark Hillringhouse

My favorite photograph is “Spruce Street Factory Warehouse with Figure.” Like an Escher drawing it demands study with its geometry and depth. A seemingly simple, flat face of an old building with dark paned windows, the drama plays out with the fire-escape zig-zagging up and down the facade. Or, is it the shadow of the fire escape? Which way do the stairs go? This factory, like the factories “Papa” and the millions of immigrants worked their second or third job, allowed the next generation a way out, an escape.

The father’s stoic toil allowed the poet to bloom, “to go to college... to absorb the feel of the city... to carry the voice of the people, my people, in my head, to hear their stories, and save them to tell.”

Both artists display Paterson’s rich and reflective life, its voice. The frozen river in Hillringhouse’s opening photograph is thawed in the closing photo, “Passaic River from Lincoln Avenue Bridge.”

The poet’s voice is like the water that surrounds Paterson Light and Shadow. “I hear these people who are so much a part of my life, their voices caught like music in my mind,” Mazziotti Gillan writes. The poems and photographs are constantly moving from light to dark, from stasis to movement, ice to water: “I had to cry a long time before I could learn to sing their songs, as my own.”

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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 along with some of her paintings is The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets . Maria's official website is MariaGillan.com.

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Exemplars Selects 'Paterson Light and Shadow' Best Poetry Collection With Photographs

In the Washington Independent Review of Books, Grace Cavalieri writes a monthly feature that reviews books of and about poetry. Recently she selected as the BEST POETRY COLLECTION WITH PHOTOGRAPHS, Paterson Light and Shadow, poems by Maria Mazziotti Gillan, photographs by Mark Hillinghouse, with an introduction by Gerald Stern. The book was published by Serving House Books in 2017.

"When we think of Paterson, we don’t think of the movie first. We go right to Maria Mazziotti Gillan who put it on the map, building on what W.C. Williams left her. 

She’s not only a poet of prolific excellence but the founder of a Poetry Center; poets-in-the-schools; mentoring workshops; classes; book awards; readings; literary magazines and print materials that showcase the poets of this generation. But let’s start with her poetry. 

At the Dodge Foundation Festival in (circa) mid-1980s, I heard her read the poem “Public School No. 18: Paterson NJ,” and I was in love. Since then I’ve never missed a word she’s written or a portrait she’s painted. 

Now we have a multidimensional emotional experience of lasting value. History, yes, authenticity, yes, and art not calculated but true. 

Photos reinforce the narrative in chilling black/white photography designed so that even color can’t distort reality. Every page is exhilaration, bringing an American city from the margins to the center of our culture."


Grace Cavalieri has written 16 books of poems, and 26 produced plays. Her latest book is Cosa Farei Per Amore , translated from her book of poems in the voice of Mary Wollstonecraft, and What I Would Do For Love. She holds the 1993 Allen Ginsberg Award for poetry, the Pen Syndicated Fiction Award, the Bordighera Poetry Award, the Columbia Award, a CPB Silver Medal among others. She is also the 2013 recipient of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs George Garrett Award “for Outstanding Community Service in Literature and for her dedication to helping the next generation of writers find their way as artists and literary professionals.“ She is co-winner of the 2013 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award. She produces “The Poet and the Poem” from the Library of Congress for public radio.

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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 along with some of her paintings is The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets . Maria's official website is MariaGillan.com.

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