Let Us Hear
Paul Mariani invites a host of other poets to his metaphorical table, and then invites us to take a seat and hear what they have to tell us.
Review by Gloria Heffernan
Paul Mariani’s newest poetry collection All That Will Be New reads like the answer to that timeless icebreaker question, “If you could invite anyone to a dinner party, who would it be?” Mariani’s guests include the many poets he has studied over his distinguished academic career, including Dante, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hart Crane, Philip Levine, William Carlos Williams, and the classics scholar Allen Mandelbaum. Best of all, the guests also include his readers, each of whom is treated to a feast as they gather at this extraordinary table.
All That Will Be New reads like a master class from one of our preeminent literary scholars. In it, Mariani depicts the assembled poets and artists not as great figures from the past, but rather as the intimate companions who have populated his life. Fittingly, the collection ends with “Supper at Emmaus,” an ekphrastic poem about Caravaggio’s painting of the meal at which Jesus reveals himself to his disciples. The narrator urges us to step into the frame and join that dinner party with a sense of wonder much like the inn keeper who “stands looking down, / puzzled as this stranger blesses the bread, then breaks it, even / as those two disciples are clearly shaken—perhaps like us / as well—by what is really happening before our eyes.”
Throughout the collection, what is happening before our eyes is a brilliant study of art, faith, friendship, and above all, language as the means by which these ideas are conveyed. In “Instructions for Leaving Behind a Broken World,” he offers up two firm commands which set the tone for the entire collection. The poem begins with a command to “Say it! Say it while there’s time, even as your / world disappears like that river crashing over the Great Falls.” It concludes with the instruction to “Listen up! It’s time you left behind your nightmare status quo.” The literal river to which the poem alludes is the Passaic River in Paterson, New Jersey, which figures so prominently in the work of William Carlos Williams. But it also refers to another river which he names in another poem, “Williams’s Paterson Those Years Ago”: “Ah, the river of language. . . / Haunting the ear of an old man who ponders the mystery / of it all, the re-verberating ever-vital river of language.”
Listening, Mariani argues, is not simply about processing sounds; it’s at the very core of our humanity.
The demand to listen is also central to “Poor Fauvette,” another ekphrastic work based on a painting by Jules Bastien-Lepage:
How many times
have you been stopped when you least expected
by someone asking you to look at them and listen?
And what was there for you to do but listen in that
freezing morning. Pain is pain. Pain is personal. Still,
you’ve learned to listen, which somehow seems to help.
To help the other, as it helps your sorry self just to know
you care.
Listening, Mariani argues, is not simply about processing sounds; it’s at the very core of our humanity. He returns again and again to this theme, as in “Wheat Field with Irises” in which he echoes Christ’s own instruction: “Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.”
Nowhere is this theme more harrowingly depicted than in the sound imagery of “Guernica,” based on Pablo Picasso’s anti-war masterpiece. While ekphrastic poetry often relies most heavily on the sense of sight, this poem is a departure in that every visual reference is underscored and literally amplified by an auditory image. The figures in the poem “knife the message home,” a figure “howls at the inconceivable loss,” a gored bull “screams,” a disembodied head “keens the truth.” In the penultimate stanza, the narrator instructs us to “Note too the human skull somewhere in the mesh / of jumbled abstract screaming images, and the dove / midway between the bull and horse, perhaps a symbol / of the Holy Ghost, though it to cries out in anguish there.” We hear every stroke of the brush and the sound is horrifying in its timeless relevance.
In “One by One They Fall,” he even demands that we listen to the trees, likening the leaves to words with a profound message of their own: “Call it the silent language of our stalwart trees. / …What is it these gentle giants have to say? / Where would we be without them, our world lack- / ing leaves, like words gone silent as they lose their way.”
In more than one instance, I went directly from a poem to a search engine to learn more about a historical reference or to reacquaint myself with a poem or painting to which he refers.
But Mariani never loses his way as he navigates this river of language. He is our guide through both heavenly images of pastoral beauty, friendship, and love, as well as hellish visions of war, racism, and pandemic. He is our guide, just as Mandelbaum, his friend and mentor, serves as his own guide. In the richly layered showpiece, “A Periplum of Poets,” Mariani and Mandelbaum mirror the journey of Dante and Virgil as the poet asks, “You above so many other guides showed me the way / to better understand my poets with their inner strife. / …what light might you offer me?” Mandelbaum, whom he addresses as “dear sage,” replies, “Call it a lifetime’s encyclopedia.” This poem is indeed encyclopedic in scope as it revisits the poets who have been most influential in both their lives.
Mandelbaum is a recurring presence throughout the book, including the opening epigraph from his translation of Dante’s Purgatorio XXVIII, which establishes the river imagery that underscores so much of the collection: “To one side, it is Lethe; on the other, / Eunoë; neither stream is efficacious / Unless the other’s waters have been tasted.” One is the river in which we forget our sins; the other “can restore recall of each good deed.”
From beginning to end, reading this collection is an immersive experience. We bathe in Mariani’s river of language and, like all the great rivers he invokes, the poems have deep and expansive tributaries. In more than one instance, I went directly from a poem to a search engine to learn more about a historical reference or to reacquaint myself with a poem or painting to which he refers. Those forays into research were not chores necessitated by some obscure reference, but rather a response to an irresistible invitation. Mariani invites us to savor each poem individually, and then the collection as a whole, and then, further still, to explore its meaning even more deeply until all that is, indeed, new.
Gloria Heffernan’s Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the 2021 Central New York Book Award for Nonfiction. She also won the 2021 Naugatuck River Review’s Narrative Poetry Prize. Gloria is the author of the poetry collection What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List (New York Quarterly Books) and three chapbooks including Peregrinatio: Poems for Antarctica, forthcoming from Kelsay Books. Her work has appeared in over 100 publications including the upcoming anthologies Poetry of Presence (vol. 2) and Without a Doubt: Poems Illuminating Faith (New York Quarterly Books).
All That Will Be New was published by Slant Books on April 18, 2022. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of a review copy, and you can purchase your own copy on their website here.
