The Melody of Memory
The tenth collection of Paul Mariani calls us to remember, to see, and most of all, to hope.
Review by Gloria Heffernan
Paul Mariani’s Sing Me a Song, She Said is a poetic memoir steeped in a rich sense of time and place. The poet, at age 87, is looking back on a lifetime of love, faith, sacrifice, and no small amount of regret. That regret centers around stories untold and songs unsung. The title of the collection emerges as a recurring theme as he remembers his mother’s tender plea:
Sing me a song, a song. Just once before I die.
A song with love in it… and memories.
Arriving at her bedside two hours after her death, he never sang that song to her in life, but now, decades later, offers this collection which soars with both love and memories. It is a wish fulfilled with tenderness, truth, and above all urgency as he contemplates his own mortality and seeks a path through a present that is fraught with violence, bigotry, and chaos.
Comprised of three sections, the book’s structure offers layers of connection between past and present. The first section, “A Song I Can Only Try to Sing,” recalls the poet’s earliest memories of growing up one of twelve siblings in an immigrant family from a working-class neighborhood in New York City. The second section, “Sing Me a Song, She Said: A Verse Drama,” is both the structural and thematic center of the collection, dramatizing a family conflict characterized by an angry father, a patient but wounded mother, and the different choices of two sons. The third section, “News that Stays News,” features the contemporary reflections of an octogenarian trying to find hope and meaning in a world where “the news per usual stays dark.” While each poem is rich in its own right, it is the weaving together of thematic threads that makes the collection so satisfying. In each section, we find individual references that reemerge like leitmotifs in an opera: music, hope, dignity, grace, work. And always, the struggle to find words to convey these ideas.
In the opening poem, “A Song I Can Only Try to Sing,” he observes:
The poet stammers, struggles day by day by day
to get down on the page what he or she’s
been graced with, the heart of it, to share it with you,
my friend, if you have but time to listen.
Yes, friend, you will want to take the time to listen and to witness the fruits of that struggle as he introduces us to an unforgettable cast of characters who have populated his life.
In addition to the family members—parents, siblings, children—he celebrates in this collection, New York City also emerges as a character both beloved and complex. The city is more than a setting or a backdrop. It is a living presence. He names individual street corners, warehouses, restaurants with a tender familiarity. This urban landscape is a part of him. In the ekphrastic poem “City Roofs, 1932,” he reveals the intimacy of his relationship with the city. Studying Edward Hopper’s painting of a New York City roofscape devoid of human habitation, the painting becomes the blank canvas of the poet’s memory. He populates the empty space with images dating back to his earliest recollections—as a toddler being photographed with his mother, as a child growing up in the 1940s, as a boy watching the Saturday matinees of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. But the City does not merely exist in the past. It rings with the urgency of the present. Remembering is not simply a passive act. It is a call to action. All of these images coalesce into a haunting and urgent question:
what are you to make of all this? The truth
is, you still don’t know, though time is running out
to find some answer.
Whether witnessing the death of a beloved sister, the heartache of his mother, the frustrations of his father, or the determination of immigrants past and present, each poem is propelled by some abiding hope.
These poems, which recall the generational hardships of an immigrant family in New York City, also point to a simmering rage directed at the way this country has rescinded the spirit of welcome that enabled his grandparents, parents, and siblings to make their way in an America he now mourns. In “Aren’t We All Immigrants?” he compares the country that welcomed his grandparents to the anti-immigrant atmosphere we find today:
…They entered
through the gates of Ellis Island, passing
that beckoning Statue of Liberty, which,
unlike the borders closed now in Texas,
Arizona, California, still, please God,
welcomes immigrants to these United States.
These issues and concerns resurface in the third section when he surveys the violence and injustice that plagues our world, leaving us mute witnesses to the horror:
You hide your head under your pillow, peace banished
with the pain of it all. Sweet Mother, I beg you, pray
for us sinners; we the stranger, the mangled, the vanished.
But he never abandons us to “the pain of it all.” To do so would be to surrender to despair, which Mariani will never do. Instead, he counters the despair with the one thing that has never abandoned him. Whether witnessing the death of a beloved sister, the heartache of his mother, the frustrations of his father, or the determination of immigrants past and present, each poem is propelled by some abiding hope. In “Somewhere Once,” an early poem in the first section, he overcomes “the driftwood memories and haunted thoughts” of family tensions with “that feathered thing called hope… as once again the mourning son returns.” That feathered thing resurfaces throughout and indeed has the last word in the final poem when Mariani takes us back to Dante, who has been the focus of much of his distinguished academic career. Thus, in “Dante in Paradise,” he observes:
Nearing our blessèd end, our intellects
sink into a black hole so deep we cannot
recall what it is we thought we ever knew.
But don’t be fooled; we are never left to sink in that black hole. Instead, Mariani takes us back to the struggle he has chronicled throughout the collection. “Haven’t we all felt it,” he asks, “a thing so real / and yet beyond what words can adequately reveal?” What could be more “real” than looking fearlessly at the past while navigating the suffering of the present? The answer is both simple and inescapable:
Hope abides.
And then, his eyes fixed on his beloved’s heavenly gaze,
the mind and heart at last purified, the chaff burnt away,
the very self alive, alert, ablaze, our once-errant ways
soldered now to the Light, the Love, and yes! The Way.
It is that hope which underpins every poem in this collection—even the most painful. Herein lies the song he sings—full of love and memories.
Gloria Heffernan is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Moments of Color and Cloud (Shanti Arts Publishing). Her craft book, Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. She won the 2022 Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Prize. Gloria’s other collections are: Fused (Shanti Arts Publishing), Peregrinatio: Poems for Antarctica (Kelsay Books), and What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List (New York Quarterly Books). She is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Now I Chant Old Age: Poems of Mindful Eldering with Phyllis Cole-Dai.
Sing Me a Song, She Said by Paul Mariani was published by Slant Books on July 21, 2026. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy from the publisher here.
