{"id":540,"date":"2018-08-21T16:18:13","date_gmt":"2018-08-21T20:18:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/?p=540"},"modified":"2018-08-21T16:18:13","modified_gmt":"2018-08-21T20:18:13","slug":"review-of-hour-of-the-ox-by-marci-calabretta-cancio-bello","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/?p=540","title":{"rendered":"Review of Hour of the Ox by Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello. Hour of the Ox. <\/em>University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016. 62 pgs. $15.95.<\/p>\n

Hour of the Ox, <\/em>which won the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, tells a story of loss, of the richness of a former life and also the richness of a current life. Its author, Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, succeeds in these poems through her reliance on imagery that is not only concrete but unusual, her trust in the power of metaphor, and her adoption of an authentic and informed yet thoughtfully quiet voice. Her language is evocative, restrained, and precise. The poems link personal memory with cultural tradition, such that disruption of one signifies disruption of the other.<\/p>\n

\u201cYour Mouth Is Full of Birds\u201d is arranged into long-lined couplets. The form suggests control and order, appropriate for this poem which is trying so hard to contain its emotions, particularly of loss. Unlike in many couplets, most of the lines here are enjambed rather than end-stopped, a strategy that destabilizes the initial sense of control. Yet the lines in each couplet conclude with either true rhymes (follow \/ swallow), near rhymes (branches \/ branded), exact repetition (said \/ said), or, in one case, an evocative form of metonymy (birds \/ rookery). Cancio-Bello\u2019s close attention to all elements of the line is matched by her subtle development of metaphor and her attractive word choice. Here is the poem:<\/p>\n

You asked me once at dawn about forgiveness and I said
\nI didn\u2019t think you had any need to be forgiven and you said<\/p>\n

nothing, pointing instead to the tangerine branches
\nheavy with five-petaled flowers and a rookery of crows branded<\/p>\n

like oiled umber in the sunlight. How grave the silences tucked
\nin each wing and beneath your tongue, silences you later tucked<\/p>\n

into my suitcase when I wasn\u2019t looking, letters written in memory
\nwhose creases I smoothed over and over until I could remember<\/p>\n

the gray trunks of the tangerine orchards, how each flower smelled,
\neach fruit peeled and quartered, full of tongues that still swell<\/p>\n

in my dreams and burst into a hundred miles of telephone wires,
\nthe silhouettes of birds still attached. Now, after all this while,<\/p>\n

when you come to me at night with your mouth full of birds,
\nI think that you meant you forgave me for the rookery,<\/p>\n

because they left their wings on my window, not yours. Oh how they follow
\nme still through this city, crying for you with every red-throated swallow.<\/p>\n

Relationships between lines and sentences are particularly interesting in this poem. The first sentence requires four-and-a-half lines, and though it consists of multiple clauses, Cancio-Bello does not separate any of them with commas, letting them run into each other instead like a person speaking too quickly, without a pause to suggest grammar\u2019s influence on meaning. She reserves the single comma to introduce the final series of phrases brimming with modifiers and objects but lacking any subject. I am examining this first sentence so closely because I am intrigued at how Cancio-Bello controls the pace of this poem and how the pace helps develop as well as subvert meaning. The enjambment between lines two and three is an example of such subversion, especially following the quickly spoken first two lines. Given the repetition of \u201cand I said\u201d and \u201cand you said,\u201d readers are expecting the words that follow \u201cyou said\u201d to be a response to \u201cI didn\u2019t think you had any need to be forgiven.\u201d But they\u2019re not. The word that follows, \u201cnothing,\u201d is a word in the poem only, not a word the \u201cyou\u201d utters. The imagery that follows is beautiful, but as the poem progresses, the speaker and the readers begin to realize that perhaps the speaker had misunderstood the \u201cyou\u201d all along. Perhaps, when the \u201cyou\u201d raised the subject of forgiveness, it wasn\u2019t the \u201cyou\u201d who required forgiveness but the speaker. The structure of this poem permits such ambiguity, which is almost always more interesting than certainty, without confusing the reader.<\/p>\n

Finally, we reach the last couplet, which is also intriguingly ambiguous, the ambiguity heightened by the line break. Many poets would have broken the line after \u201cme\u201d rather than after \u201cfollow,\u201d so that we\u2019d have this final couplet: \u201cbecause they left their wings on my window, not yours. Oh how they follow me \/ still through this city, crying for you with every red-throated swallow.\u201d This slight shift doesn\u2019t substantially affect the meaning of the first line, but it does dilute the possibilities of the second. Who is crying, \u201cthey\u201d or \u201cme\u201d? \u201cRed-throated\u201d is a phrase often applied to birds, though not crows particularly, and \u201cswallow\u201d is of course also a common bird. In a less-accomplished poem, this language would serve only as a clever pun, but here the language encourages readers to recall the birds that have populated the entire poem as well as the title, \u201cYour Mouth Is Full of Birds,\u201d before they consider the alternate (and to my mind, more likely) possibility that the speaker is (also) \u201ccrying for you.\u201d<\/p>\n

The best poems reward such close reading, not merely for the purpose of literary analysis, but for instruction in craft. I am often astonished at the skill of contemporary poets. I read a poem, and I wonder, \u201cHow did she do that?\u201d And then I think, \u201cI want to do that, too.\u201d Nearly all readers, I think, will enjoy the poems in Hour of the O, <\/em>even when the poems themselves are somber. Readers who are also poets will want to read and reread, hovering above these pages in order to absorb just a little, and then a little more, of Cancio-Bello\u2019s skill.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello. Hour of the Ox. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016. 62 pgs. $15.95. Hour of the Ox, which won the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, tells a story of loss, of the richness of a former life and also the richness of a current life. Its author, Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, succeeds in these […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-areviewaweek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=540"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":542,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540\/revisions\/542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}