{"id":8198,"date":"2023-05-25T19:11:31","date_gmt":"2023-05-25T19:11:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=8198"},"modified":"2023-05-25T19:17:44","modified_gmt":"2023-05-25T19:17:44","slug":"the-moon-on-elba","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2023\/05\/25\/the-moon-on-elba\/","title":{"rendered":"The Moon on Elba"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Gardens of Delight<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Poet and translator Andrew Frisardi demonstrates the fertile soil of traditional forms in his newest collection of verse.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Tessa Carman
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Not one of us can write poetry free from tradition\u2014and if we\u2019re hung up on being \u201coriginal,\u201d we risk writing a diminutive verse that has not feasted on the riches of the ages. We run the danger of tending poems in a fallow field, whose soil would need years of composition and decomposition in order to produce the richest yield. Only in a field where different livestock have pastured, and crops have grown, decomposed, and entered the life of the soil, will new life sprout. Tradition is the wellspring of fertility.<\/p>

To the modern mind, it seems paradoxical that adhering to form can be freeing. In Andrew Frisardi\u2019s 2020 book on Dante, Love\u2019s Scribe: Reading Dante in the Book of Creation<\/em>, he finds a parallel in the common frustration with \u201corganized religion\u201d:<\/p>

Those who too easily dismiss orthodoxy as mere \u201cdogmatism\u201d ignore the essential point that truth realizes itself in the human mind within a matrix of form. Truth does not deny<\/em> forms, but goes beyond them from within, much as an artist who has mastered form can discover formal freedom in creative inspiration.<\/p><\/blockquote>

Frisardi compares the freedom that form gives in poetry to the freedom given within Catholic orthodoxy, in Dante\u2019s art specifically, in this way: The fundamental articles of faith, such as the Nicene Creed, \u201care like the soil in which one plants the seed of one\u2019s thought, as it were, not cemetery ground for burying the cadaver of thought.\u201d To \u201creinvent individual by individual\u201d\u2014or poet by poet\u2014we\u2019ll still be drawing on tradition; we\u2019ll just have a much shallower creed\u2014or in the realm of art, lesser music.<\/p>

When we have a scholar-translator-poet such as Frisardi, who has tilled the fertile soil of Italy\u2019s greatest poet for many years, and who is adept at observing our sublunar life, we\u2019re in for a treat. In Love\u2019s Scribe<\/em> he quotes Dante\u2019s De vulgari eloquentia<\/em>, in which poetry is defined as \u201can invention or fiction composed through rhetoric and music.\u201d So then, a poet makes form from language and music\u2014both aural and oral forms themselves\u2014woven together. And in his new poetry collection from Wiseblood Books, The Moon on Elba<\/em>, Frisardi continually pleases with his deft wielding of wit, word, and song. These are poems of gentle insight and sharp wit that evince joy both in wordplay and in our strange, heartbreaking world.<\/p>

The title poem of Frisardi\u2019s collection is a good representation of the jewels he gives us: \u201cThe Moon on Elba\u201d is a ghazal, a poem comprised of couplets with a particular rhyme scheme, its theme usually love and loss, derived from the Arabic and Persian traditions. Like many a poetic form throughout the ages\u2014from Davidic psalms to Beowulf<\/em> all the way up to jazz poetry from the likes of Langston Hughes and Dana Gioia\u2014the ghazal would traditionally be accompanied with music. Since the seventh-century Arabian and medieval Persian poets, the form has been used in German and Spanish, Hebrew and Hindi, Turkish and English. The repetitive rhymes steadily build tension:<\/p>

The moon is the sun on vacation. Peeping on Elba,
It sauntered and climbed like a vine creeping on Elba.<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

It\u2019s been said that the moon is mad, a disturbance in blood:
Just right for soccer fans and dancers leaping on Elba.<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

It was, as usual, corrupting the parchments of light,
Or else that night would be in safe keeping, on Elba.<\/p><\/blockquote>

\u201cThat night\u201d alludes to the \u201cheartbreak\u201d (from the fifth stanza) on the speaker\u2019s mind:<\/p>

Heartbreak is best in a song, but when it\u2019s in life
And unsung, you could do worse than be weeping on Elba.<\/p><\/blockquote>

And yet the heartbreak does enter a song\u2014this one. Note the complete thoughts of each stanza, the full stop after the rhyme. Each stanza is meant to be considered, drop by drop. The poem quietly builds its song of longing to a crescendo in the sixth couplet, and a denouement in the seventh.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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The Moon on Elba<\/em> was grown in rich soil, and its lines are profuse with the sensitivity and intelligence of well-ordered memory and a finely tuned ear.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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The rest of Frisardi\u2019s collection delights in the riches of poetic forms in English, its lines easily alighting in memory. Several are sonnets\u2014a demanding yet supple form, pleasing in its succinct marriage of sound and sense\u2014including \u201cAn Old Cassette-Letter\u201d (originally published in Plough<\/em>) and \u201cThe Virgin Martyr\u201d\u2014bracingly moving and adept in its tone changes. The latter begins:<\/p>

It wasn\u2019t just that she refused to doff
Her honor to a lie so she might live.
What really pissed her persecutors off
Was that her love did nothing positive
For the economy.<\/p><\/blockquote>

Each line break offers its own thought\u2014\u201cshe refused to doff\u2026\u201d (we think of her removing clothing)\u2014before the next line finishes the image, challenging and changing what we thought in the first line (rather it\u2019s her honor that she maintains). The fourth line also challenges while delighting with its cadences\u2014\u201cher love did nothing positive\u201d\u2014before the fifth line finishes with dark irony\u2014\u201cfor the economy.\u201d The poem finishes in beautiful poignance thus:<\/p>

Instead, her lap and torso formed a C<\/em>
Around the unknown life that entered her
When she was praying all alone one day
Beside a lily. When she felt it stir,
To get it out they burned the C away,
But only saw a mote. Nobody knew
It was the seed of charity that grew.<\/p><\/blockquote>

Her accusers cannot see the log in their own eye\u2014and yet this \u201cmote,\u201d the seed of charity within the pure virgin, is greater than any earthly they can do to her.<\/p>

A poem on Covid, \u201cThe Distance,\u201d is written in Sapphic verse, and another presents a character vignette of \u201cThe Jeweler\u201d: \u201cMoney talks but jewels sparkle.\u201d An ode in ballade form for Timothy Murphy (a delight for me to read, especially after recently reading Murphy\u2019s collection Devotions<\/em>) praises the North Dakota poet\u2019s own translations of culture, poetry, and song:<\/p>

What Yalie had such wherewithal
For song in words that he was heir
To Hardy with a Yankee drawl
And Frost served up with Catholic fare?
What dude made Anglo-Saxon blare
American, and out of dim
Old Beowulf<\/em> wrote verse with hair?
That singing contradiction, Tim.<\/p><\/blockquote>

The Moon on Elba<\/em> also includes translations of poems by twentieth-century Italian poets Maria Luisa Spaziani and Cristina Campo, as well as the thirteenth-century Bolognese Guido Guinezzelli.<\/p>

Through transposing form and composing from a sensitive intelligence, the poet creates new music, and the music is essential to the meaning. The truth and beauty of a poem, then, goes beyond the form, from within the form. The Moon on Elba<\/em> was grown in rich soil, and its lines are profuse with the sensitivity and intelligence of well-ordered memory and a finely tuned ear\u2014\u201cAs breakers stir the everywhere azure \/ Into an ecstasy of ash\u201d; \u201cAt bedtime I undress-rehearse for death\u201d; \u201cIt speaks our speaking: in \/ The beginning was the word, \/ It\u2019s what the silence heard\u201d; \u201cTo right the daylight’s wrong \/ And nurse invisibility \/ To turn to song.\u201d They ought to be read aloud\u2014or better still, chanted and sung.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Tessa Carman<\/strong> writes from Mount Rainier, Maryland.<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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The Moon on Elba<\/strong> was published by Wiseblood Books on May 10, 2023.<\/em> Fare Forward thanks them for providing a copy to our reviewer. You can purchase a copy from the publishers here<\/a>.<\/em>
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Poet and translator Andrew Frisardi demonstrates the fertile soil of traditional forms in his newest collection of verse. Review by Tessa 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