Thomas Centolella

"A savoring spirit...", April 9, 2000
(http://www.amazon.com/Terra-National-Poetry-Thomas-Centolella/dp/155659030X/sr=1-2/qid=1168392850/ref=sr_1_2/103-5320052-6287067?ie=UTF8&s=books)

"A savoring spirit," and not a savior, Tom Centolella proposes, is what's needed. TERRA FIRMA is a volume to carry around with you - a distinctively companionable voice, antidote to ennui with life's vicissitudes, or even with dismay that might arise in your mind (as you traverse this infirm earth), over the state of contemporary poetry. Somewhere in every poem, Centolella amicably shares his take on Yeats' "importance of the life or of the work" conundrum in his own peripatetic images, touching our own lives with his erudition and savvy. "Everyone has been damaged to near extinction. Everyone/has loved inordinately those they should not have loved/ except in the most disembodied spirit of good will," he writes in "Misterioso": and while his poetic pronouncements are ever-well-crafted, the reader's delight lies as much in his rich, ranging particulars: "...the international/orange of the Golden Gate Bridge in the far distance, and closer/the gold onion domes of the Russian Orthodox Church, made more golden/ by the sun going down: a scene like a picture postcard of the absolute."

Centolella's poetry has the heart to encompass generations of forebears stretching back to the Old World: "...I have no trouble/imagining the woman who's been everywhere/and says Enough in four languages: English, Italian, Baby, Silence." ("Nocturne: New Year's Eve"), and with his wise allusions to Marcus Aurelius, Virgil and Vivaldi, Walt Whitman and Thoreau and Thelonius Monk; his stark participation in everyday joys and near-disasters, he creates a widely empathic, time-traveling citizenry for the land on which his poetry lives.

And, even while he speaks of the times when "Every phone call was long distance, even the local ones", Centolella also knows of a "local cure": a string of images in his "Sun Sang", for example, might be an anthem for the lushness of San Francisco's Chinatown. "After her young boy toppled the boiling kettle", first line of Centolella's poem "Fog Light", will always bring me back to an exact moment in my own experience, and I thank his poetic guardian angel for "The Task" - to "recover the taken-for-granted". Another poem, "Girl in a Peasant Blouse", shows masterfully how poetry illuminates the news (as in William Carlos Williams' warning, "that no one gets the news from reading poetry, but hundreds die every day from lack of what is found in it.")

TERRA FIRMA came out, coincidentally, the year that I began living abroad: for me, and other expatriates with whom I've shared the "news of it" -- for a decade, now --, it has often indeed provided a blessed kind of firm ground.… (más)

Facing tough luck and locating compassion:
Another of Centolella's lovely balancing acts - between facing tough luck and locating compassion; between the good and bad examples of the past, living lithely in the present, and wondering over the courage the future may require.

Also, of course, as the title suggests, between "grim force" ("On the Way to Work") and "inspired chaos" ("What Helped"), and between East and West. As ever, Centolella's mind is on the Old World and the New, hand-coloring maps from Italy and Greece to Poland, and back to "prison yard, barnyard, box canyon,/ through a conference call, bedroom...," all our own daily troubles and delights. When called upon, the poet shares the perfectly awful disillusion of imperfect individuals, alive and dead. And shares with us, through paeans to nature ("Cholla, coyote, scampering quail/ with thier silly plume curling out/ of each head like a party favor"), to music ("bebop, hip-hop, acid house, trance, raga, salsa, a capella..."), and to tentative human vertices("Inviting to my touch, but cool at first./ Then warmer the longer I held you,") the reasons we might have; beginning, middle and end; to hope. "Let blindness/ afflict the figure of Justice. This angel brings/ her human hand to his, and softly sings/ her Grazie. There is no greater law than kindness."

"Ancestral" reassures us on the subject of ghostly judges: "They were a vexed/ and lonely and desperate bunch,/ the ones who came before us./ Did I mention that often/ they didn't know where/ they were going? Often they didn't/ know where they were going." The same poem reflects Centolella's wide reading in, and glad musing on, poetry itself and glorious diction: "Breath. Electricity. Foreknowledge/ of death. Many knew too well/ the dolor of doing nothing, many/ the despair of their best efforts/ not being good enough," might be a reply to Roethke's disembodied, "I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,/ Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight..."

Among those Centolella honors is Denise Levertov, for whom he wrote "Mentor" - wherein he notes well that there are ways to make-a-difference, without being prosaic about it. "Like you, I took the true path to be/ half fog, half rumor beneath my feet./ Like you, I kept going anyway."

"...so I kept walking, and soon/ the storefronts and the houses revealed a patina/ like gold leaf, the shabby stacks of apartments/ glistening like a honeycomb, and every face I passed/ owned a Mediterranean glow..." The long San Francisco poem "Drifting", contains anticipated examples of Centolella's gift with particulars. And again, continuing the stanza, of his goodhearted reverence for poetic forebears: "... - all of which I knew/ was only the low sun up to its old tricks." ("Busy old foole, unruly Sunne, why dost thou thus?!")

Along the way, in this fine addition to Centolella's remarkable body of handsomely-published work, is his "Calling": an internal monologue, a tactile interior scene. "Later, putting away the red pears/ and the provolone, a white onion,/ a sunburst squash -everything with a name/ and a place to which it belonged -/ you realized why you'd been convinced/ you were invisible: you lived outside/ your time. Your era was not inconsequential/ but your name seemed to be..." "And yet," he completes the thought at poem's end, "you could be called by someone/ in need, whom you might never see again,/ or who might fail to remember you -/ fail to give you your due - you could be called/ and you would choose, almost/ without thinking, to answer."… (más)