~KATHLEEN MULLEN~
CATHERINE
TUFARIELLO: KEEPING MY NAME
The pleasures of formal
poetry abound in Keeping My Name.
In Tufariello’s sonnets you
will find both exactness
and flexibility, a
responsive freedom playing
within the form. She
loves rhyme and
sometimes uses
it to enhance the sensibility
or action of the poem.
The first time I picked up Catherine
Tufariello’s Keeping My Name,
I paged through it, reading here and there, for about twenty
minutes. Then I had to close it, put it down, walk away, settle
my mind. Here’s my confession: such a wave of envy gripped
me! I wanted to have written these poems; and, after a good
number of further readings, I confess I still want to write poems like
these.
So if, like me, you enjoy these pleasures — a formal
poetry that creates surprises within its
careful forms; a voice that’s
direct and immediate, all the while modulated by close attention to a
chosen structure; a variety of subjects drawn from personal experience
and distilled through concise reflection; a language both exuberant and
disciplined — then Tufariello’s book belongs among those on your
bedside table.
Among my favorites is “Chemist’s Daughter,” which
opens the book’s second section, Seasons
of the Moon. In the first eleven of its spare twelve
lines, I hear the voice of a child remembering the physics her father
taught at the dinner table one night: “Thumping the dinner table,
Dad would say / it too was atoms — massed in galaxies / made mainly of
empty space.” Then the speaker reflects on the consequences of that
knowledge for her, “At night, the bees’ / drone of electrons woke me”;
she imagines “a Milky Way / was whirling on the tip of my fingernail, /
ten thousand planets dancing on its pale / half moon” and wonders,
“Would bed, desk, and dresser lose their grip / on the braided rug?”
The child delights in scaring herself with these strange but
father-true possibilities. Finally, in line twelve, a marvelous
pair of sentences that captures, mirrors, and extends the essential
appearance/reality problem, the child transcends her own understanding
and the voice breaks through in a surprising way: “The world looked
solid. It was wild as thought.”
That last simile/rhyme just stuns me with its
acuteness, precision. The rhyme pair “astronaut/thought”
literally sails us through the stars, taking us from an adventurous
child’s game, “playing astronaut,” to the really daring, unpredictable
wildness of being human, “thought.” And then, doesn’t it open out into
imagination, the world of metaphor that extends rational thought?
I find that that “wild as thought” quality,
understated or sometimes only hypothesized, undergirds much of the work
of this volume. In “February 18, 1943,” the poem in memory of Hans and
Sophie Scholl, leaders of the White Rose resistance movement, for
instance, the world “looks solid” to them, as they stand outside the
university building, free, after having distributed resistance leaflets
there between classes. But then, something makes them choose to brave
the danger of returning, “…you raced together / Back to the empty hall
/ And up the stairs, to let the last ones fall.” Tufariello uses
questions to catch the wildness of their decision, but the questions
themselves show how unequal to the task of understanding this act of
heroism we are — “Was it that you suddenly felt young?” “Or was it the
recklessness of the desperate?” “Was it the change in weather… .”
What, to me, embodies the wildness here are the luminous images as the
leaflets, themselves literally “thought,” fall.
I imagine,
then, how you leaned from the great height
Of the gallery
railing into a well of light;
How, giddy
with boldness and vertigo,
You popped the
latch and—hurriedly this time—scooped
The leftover
handfuls out.
For a few
seconds, the pages must have swooped
Like wind-torn
blossoms, sideways in the air,
Filling the
gallery with a storm of white… .
What follows is the unfortunate ending: how Jakob Schmid the porter
captures them, the other students drawing back as the classes change,
“And the doors all locked.” But what remains is affirmation:
daring action, acts of integrity, can bring light — and lightness — to
the solid, predictable world.
I find this quality as well in the stories
Tufariello tells of other characters — the little girl in “Dana
Dancing”; the walrus in his Coney Island Poem; Ruth, and then Boaz in
the “No Angel” sequence, the speaker of “The Dream of Extra
Room.” I find it also in the villanelle form she chooses for the
mysterious poem “Snow Angel,” and in the tone of amazement that
pervades the sonnet “In Glass.”
The pleasures of formal poetry abound in Keeping My Name. In
Tufariello’s sonnets you will find both exactness and flexibility, a
responsive freedom playing within the form. She loves rhyme and
sometimes uses it to enhance the sensibility or action of the poem. The
couplets of “Keeping My Name” link up and satisfy and draw the reader
on just as the game of finding words within her name has drawn the
child and then the poet on. Those of “Twenty Weeks,” intimate direct
address of a mother to her unborn child, image their unity of flesh and
spirit, and draw into their lives the names and stories of those for
whom the child is named. The rhymes of “Florida’s Flowers” tumble
along, a glorious, delighted profusion, only two unrhymed among the 82
lines. “Epitaph for a Stray” uses clean-cut quatrains containing
affection and humor to make its wry, ironic point. “Useful Advice,” is
crafted from well-intentioned ordinary speech which accumulates as
friends and strangers alike offer advice to a childless couple.
In fact, the speech is so familiar that the poem’s couplet form comes
somewhat as a surprise; once seen, however, it transforms these
platitudes into a darkly humorous but unbearable repetition of the
couple’s failure to conceive.
Other pleasures I find in the volume are equally
satisfying. The decorous, far-seeing Yeatsian overtones in
“Twenty Weeks,” for instance, as both poets write prayers for their
daughters. Realizing that the arc of a journey is appearing in
the arrangement of the poems and finding linkages, conversations, among
them. Savoring the interwoven lyric of ideas and rhyme in the
translation of Guizinelli’s “Al cor
gentil ripara semper Amore.” Finding “Useful Advice, the
Sequel,” as it too captures ordinary language to celebrate both a young
mother and child and, this time affectionately, the perpetual presence
of well-meaning busybodies. I could go on, but I’ll leave you to
the pleasure of your own discoveries within this satisfying and
accomplished first collection.
Tufariello, Catherine. Keeping
My Name. Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press,
2003. ISBN: 0-89672-529-4 $14.95
© by Kathleen Mullen
