[Book Review from Blueline: A Literary Magazine Dedicated to the Spirit of the Adirondacks, Vol 45, pp. 137-140.]
Already Long Ago. David Giannini. Dos Madres Press, 2023.
Reviewed by Edward Komara
David Giannini has been prolific and widely published since his first monograph of poetry, Opens, was published in 1971 (New York: Genesis: Grasp). As a resident of Becket, Massachusetts in the Berkshire Mountains, he has experienced and written about the kind of high-elevation winters that shape life and landscapes within the Adirondack Blue Line. Such congenial moods and masterly craft come together in his 2023 collection, Already Long Ago. One of its poems, “Portrait,” was first published in Blueline 43.
The longest of the three preliminary epigrams is from an article by John Horgan (“When Things Feel Unreal, Is That a Delusion or an Insight?,” Scientific American, June 14, 2022). Horgan’s question invokes the 4th century B.C. Greek philosopher Plato, the 8th century Hindu philosopher Adi Shankara, and the Buddhist doctrine of annata; each of them ask whether our perceptions may or may not be illusory, and if they are, then what is the ultimate reality? In one poem in Already Long Ago, “Our House, A Partial Underlying List,” Giannini seems to echo this epigram by naming his own trio, the Italian, Chinese and Indian thinkers “Leopardi / Lao Tze / Tagore.”
Giannini opens this collection by stating up front what we can expect: the “poems in this book are selected from a year’s worth of work in writing lyric and narrative poems, songs, prosepoems, hybrid haibun, short and long-lined haiku.” Variations on all of these poetic forms may be found in Already Long Ago. The classic three-line 5/7/5 syllabic scheme for haiku may be found in “Three Openings, a Brief Meditation with Peonies.” Modified forms also appear in Already Long Ago, as in the conclusion of “Poem Ending with Haiku,” whose syllabic scheme is 7/8/2, a redistributed form of the usual 5/7/5 arrangement: “I won’t blow the white head off / that last upright dandelion— / Einstein.”
Furthermore, Giannini states that Already Long Ago “is one work, whole, a year within it, but not in terms of its chronology.” For me, this sounds like an invitation to dip into the book at any random page. I’ll begin with the second section, “Eight Winter Poems.” In the prosepoem “A Sense of Eternity in Winter,” the book’s title words “already long ago” are embedded in a passage about a man gazing at the outer edge of a frozen pond. (The poet acknowledges [p. iv] that these title words came from his previous book, The Dawn of Nothing Important.) That sense of eternity is conveyed by the man’s seeing that “his boot prints in snow had turned to ice. They had been standing for days or years, in front of his house, as if waiting for the one who would warm them…” As a contrast, the passing time is illustrated with budding and unfolding tree leaves: “Daphne was still turning into a laurel tree. / Many leaves or moments passed …” Another poem, “Love on Ice,” displays Giannini’s distinctive use of the song form, with the recurring refrain “The cold is bringing out warmth,” to evoke the kinetic shaking of a snow globe from the perspective of the inner base alongside the cast figures. “Riffing on Xanadu” is a series of unrhymed couplets playing on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s classic poem “Kubla Khan” and its “caves of ice.”
The diversity of thought heralded in the epigrams is borne out by the 16 poems in Section III. Here there are references to Buddha (“Buddha Statue”), China (‘On My Birthday” and “Yellow River Frag”), Judaism (“Genesis/Conumdrum” and “Discussion and Riddle”), France (“The Enlightenment”), and ancient Egypt (“Partially Deciphered Papyrus”). Buddha is invoked memorably in two poems, as the titular figure in “Buddha Statue,” and in an elder Christian monk’s admonition to “Best forget Buddha he’s just too far / beyond the lanterns of our faith …” (“An Old Christian Monk Speaks While Walking with a Novitiate”).
What snaps my attention back to the stated purpose of the Horgan epigram is the Hebrew term “tohubohu” that is used as the title of a poem in the fourth section called Bildungsroman. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the meaning of “tohubohu” as “chaos, confusion,” and goes further by explaining its etymology as “Hebrew tōhū wā-bhōhū without form and void.” This explanation recalls Genesis 1:2, “(And the earth was) without form, and void.” Since there was no light, arguably then there was no sun to mark the beginning of each day, hence no time and there, perhaps, may be the ultimate reality on which God created the earth and sun as we experience them. In Giannini’s poem “Tohubohu”), the chaos is perceived as the drops falling from a teddy bear’s ear clipped on a clothesline. “Blood of course I thought / blood! Splats of chaos / on a rose below the window.” The poet likens this sight to the human circulation system, whether stretched out to its full length, or coiled within the human body. We’re compelled to wonder: which version of that system is more true? Giannini seems to offer a means towards finding an answer in “After School, Reading Descartes”: “… Not meaning / to put Descartes before the horse, / I deduced the beast of the world itself / as a drowning totem, mere notion, / while the real stallion approached / the apple in my hand.”
The fifth and final section begins appropriately with an “Aubade and Regression,” repurposing the lovers’ farewell at dawn to depict the speaker’s father’s departure from musical creativity “even when his wits slipped.” Musical quotes, allusion and structures permeate the poems in this section, and Giannini’s deftness with song refrains and lyric variations is evident here. Turning to the long first section of 19 poems, I admit to feeling dazzled by the dreamlike quality of some of the verses, such as the end of “Woes of a Poet Chef”: “dropping their Covid masks, / their ears falling deaf, / the patrons have no mouths.” Another poem in this section, “Cycle,” seems to begin in the middle: “And always I return to the room with its pine walls waiting / for nothing.” To keep my bearings, I have Giannini’s use of song structures and the presence of the classic 5/7/5 haiku form (as noted previously about “Three Openings, a Brief Meditation with Peonies”).
What makes the whole of Already Long Ago greater than the sum of its parts is the wide range of his sources and the depth of the thoughts they inspire. For me, the power of his verses comes not in the varying lengths of his lines, but in the placement of single words like “tohuboru,” “cumulonimbus” (as we see in “Another Hour Under Clouds”), and “roister” (in “Pebbled Lake Beach”). The challenge posed by this collection for avid readers of nature writing is: what truly underlies the beauties of the mountains if they are illusory, and would we express that basis only with blunt words, if at all?
