Robert Dunsdon

Quite by chance, in a preliminary reading, I came across the first line of what I consider one of the finest poems in this collection and was immediately reassured that I was in the company of a poet of substance. “Past the cypresses notched into fish-gilled cliffs,” is a succinct and instantly conceivable image (you can see them, can’t you, the stubborn clouds of green folded into blasted rock) which sets the standard for a whole gallery of such in this award-winning book. Untainted by cliché, by dry deadening language or an overload of abstract nouns, what’s on offer is a bold and refreshing originality, both in subject matter and treatment; a quality not easily attained in a crowded field.   

Stephen Massimilla is a painter and photographer as well as being a poet adept at probing personal and external concerns in a persuasively nuanced manner weighted with conviction. He is able to call on these disciplines to pick out the details that lend an extra dimension to a particular scene, or to bring up the highlights when establishing an atmosphere. In the opening few lines of a piece echoing a poem from the second World War, imagining an Italy free of fascism, Massimilla admirably demonstrates this rare skill:

                    A thick fog of maddened mayflies

                    swirls around dirty lamps and over the parapets.

                    Underfoot, they form a shroud of crackling

                    sugar. Spring slowly frees

                    the nocturnal frost

                    from caverns, ghosted gardens

                    extending from Maiano to the shores.

That unstrained facility is again evident in the nervously restless “Pieces”, where the narrator loses himself in recalling fragments; listing almost lyrically the disintegration seemingly all around him: the empty shells of cicadas, broken glass littering a telephone booth, a “fraction of blue heron” caught above reeds and, rather wonderfully, the spectacle of mirror-fish in a choppy pond. It’s nicely observed and related in such a way as to allow the reader, through a series of slyly disquieting images, admittance to a personal reverie. The poem is immediately followed by “Harbor’s Edge” which is also a sort of inventory of selective images, ranging from periwinkles’ “mosque tops”, and “Wakes like tails / of comets far out,” to a tiny hermit crab sidling in a tidepool. Constructed as a series of short tercets carried by internal rhyme and embroidered with descriptive flourishes which unerringly hit the mark, it is, in its own quiet way, equally effective.

Exploring various themes, sometimes lingering in the shadows, sometimes under an unforgiving light where settled ideas and sentiment are stripped back to a clarity not always welcome, the fifty-odd poems in four parts offer us a comprehensive picture of the poet’s preoccupations and concerns in interconnected diversions which are both fascinating and skilfully put together. As indeed is the book as a whole; that is, there’s an easy flow from poem to poem. The ordering of contents in a collection of verse, just as much as pictures in an exhibition, is an art in itself, and is something editors and publishes all too often fail to recognise. 

Living in Sea Cliff NY, it’s natural that Massimilla should draw on the spirit of the ocean in establishing a mood, a state of mind, in which he can develop his thoughts. He does so to good effect in several poems, but perhaps most impressively in “No Night to Drown In”. It is a long elegiac piece, elegant in its

telling and unnerving in its impact. Perhaps not an easy poem to read, it nevertheless rewards an effort of imagination with its inventive language and lazily rhythmic pace. After the line mentioned at the top of this review, the poem continues:

                    past five white egrets

                    whose ghosts in the trees were brides

                    Past the three sacred gates

                    to this island of death:

                    a slap of oars told this fog

                    about more helpless cargo

and over the following four pages, in six nicely delineated sections, it progresses intriguingly, accumulating some finely crafted and highly original imagery along the way. The poem has the feeling of a mysterious saga, leading the reader through a series of incident and comment that is bewildering at times in its swerves and departures, but nicely held together by a structural restraint and some remarkably lyrical passages.

Parked up near Long Island Sound, we stay with the taste and sting of salt air in our faces with “Full Cooler”, a picture-postcard like poem colouring a scene where leafless spaces blink beyond faint boats, and where the “Moon is a double fish- / hook in the corner of my car / window…”. The piece is unusual in that it appears to be straightforwardly descriptive, whereas there is a sense of worry, or loss, that seems to hang in the air like an omen throughout Frank Dark generally, and more specifically in poems such as “Lost Spring”. Here, a photograph taken twenty years earlier is the spur for a short but rather touching lament leaving the reader sensitive to the situation without entirely understanding the background. Unsettling as some of these poems are, there is nonetheless an indefinable element that somehow lifts them; bestowing on them a kind of grace.

Let us end, fittingly, with a look at “Last Poem” which is just that in an offering of verse both intellectually and poetically satisfying, and whose overall characteristic might be termed an awareness of, and sensitivity to, detail; to the seemingly insignificant, the ephemeral and the all too real that is everywhere around us, informing, warning and reproaching if only we would consent to open our eyes. In a testament to that idea, the final few lines, following a singular representation of a late summer day, note:

                    …what untrained / observers refuse to notice:

                    the ubiquitous, particulate facts

                    of transit, our unscripted

                    planet whipping through

                    the universe, though maybe

                    that’s taking things

                    too far. 

It’s a seemly conclusion to an honest and thoughtful collection encouraging us to meet head-on that which is before us – be it troubling, enlightening or downright beautiful – in this frenetic multifarious world.