| Muses Review - Book Review- Summer 2005 |
| Izanami Caesar's Chapbook Review |
| Buy This Book: Voce Velatura: A Fictional Narrative Poem by Patricia D'Alessandro |
| Izanami Caeasar's Chapbook Review is published in Muses Review with permission from the author. |
| Book Data: Title of Chapbook:Voce Velatura: A Fictional Narrative Poem Author: Patricia D'Alessandro (California) Genre: Poetry, ISBN: Publisher: Release Date: 2004 Book Format: Paper back Book Binding: Perfect Book Size: 5 in x 8 in Pages: Price: $12.00 Shipping: 2$ for first book.(1.50$ for second piece.) Bookstores: Muses Review Method of Payment: Credit Card or check Email: editor@musesreview.org Postmail: 2267 Woodranch Road, San Jose CA 95131, USA |
| Review received by Muses Review on May 22, 2005, Sun ----------------------------------------------- Title: Voce Velatura: A Fictional Narrative Poem Author: Patricia D'Alessandro SIDEBAR: Voce Velatura: A Fictional Narrative Poem (2004) is a self-published work with registered ISBN. Purchase Price: ($12.00) Where to Buy: a copy at the Book Collector, 1008 24th Street, Sacramento, CA, 916-442-9295 or City Lights Books, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA, 415-362-8193. ----------------------- Chapbook Review by Izanami Caesar (497 words @ single space; 12 pt. Times New Roman) I look at the small crone replicated in a turn-of-the-century photograph of poet Patricia D'Alessandro's grandmother, Petronilla, on the cover of her chapbook, Voce Velatura: A Fictional Narrative Poem, before me. I see a sour almost frowning face with two different persons' hands, right and left of her, firmly resting over small shoulders as if pressing nonna down into a chair as a synchronized pair. Petronilla's eyes reflect something; she appears to be sad, angry, or both. D'Alessandro's chapbook tries to unravel a mystery: Why is her name so rarely mentioned by family members? According to granddaughter D'Alessandro, while studying under poet and workshop instructor, Cathleen Fraser, she was encouraged to "write about someone in your family you don't know." The result was the poem "Letter from a Nonna Never Known" (pp. 11-16), an honorable mention in the 1995 Alan Ginsberg Poetry Contest. Nine years later, this intimate poem-as-letter became the genesis for a collection of fifteen more poems on themes of loss and discovery. Most of D'Alessandro's verse in Voce Velatura: A Fictional Narrative Poem were crafted sometime between 1995 and 2004, some in 1991. Groups of connected poems juxtapose in continuum, next to enlightening quotations. D'Alessandro makes personal discoveries about herself and during the process, explores her own womanhood and believable pathos, with nonna as presiding Muse and spirit guide. Her poems read like heart-felt prosaic Victorian correspondence between the two. Or secret messages as verse between two pagans that are spiritual blood relatives from different centuries. D'Alessandro refers to a simulacrum in Voce Velatura: A Fictional Narrative Poem. In stanza six, verses one through five, of "To Hear, To Be.... ",she writes, "My need is great to help you find your way/ through the eclipse/ incognito,/ you are my simulacrum/ I wear your name". D'Alessandro looked for her mother's mother, the famiglia member she never knew, when all she had an old photograph. So she begins a search stateside and in Italy for more information and documents the quest in somewhat prosaic and lyrical narrative verse. French philosopher and cultural critic Jean Baudrillard explains the effect of this type of investigation in Simulations: "...metaphysical despair came from the idea that the images concealed nothing at all, and that in fact they were not images, such as the original model would have made them, but actually perfect simularcra forever radiant with their own fascination ... ." A copy of Petronilla's replicated face is almost enigmatic. Unlike the mysterious woman in Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of Mona Lisa, D'Alessandro speculates about her famiglia model; poems became letters that needed to be written, revealing hints, dreams, of what her nonna might have been like, living in Bellosguardo as a 19th Century Italian wife, bound to traditional customs and an unknowable silence. Petronilla, if still alive, I imagine, would be pleased with her nipotina's documentary poems. D'Alessandro has not allowed nonna to fade, even if it means inventing family history about a relative she now knows spiritually. *** ------------ N.B. to Ed.: Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983), pp. 8-9. The title of Pat's chapbook contains "foreign words". Titles are italicized. But if there are any foreign words present, reverse is the norm. My favorite dual example of this is: Charles Baudelaire, from "The Artist's Confiteor" in The Parisian Prowler / Le Spleen de Paris. Petits Poèms en prose, translated by Edward K. Kaplan, etc. |
| Book Photo not available. |
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