When the Stars Were Still Visible
Maria Mazziotti Gillan
Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2021
Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s newest collection, When the Stars Were Still Visible, continues the poet’s decades-long Proustian excavation of time and memory. In Gillan’s oeuvre, time, and memory, sometimes occluded by, but never subsumed in, nostalgia, form a garden of forking paths the poems journey through, on the way toward a kind of secular earned communion. This journey takes Mazziotti Gillan away from, and returns her to, the “dark foreign self” she initially hated as a schoolgirl her poem “Growing Up Italian.” The story that Mazziotti Gillan so frequently returns to is the story of how a young girl (a daughter of immigrants, born into poverty) whose first poem was published in Saint Anthony Messenger carved out a life for herself as a successful poet and professor. For Mazziotti Gillan, the processes of assimilation into the mainstream American middle class are convoluted and nuanced, fraught with peril and freighted with meaning. Her work constantly retraces the streets of Paterson, New Jersey, and yet the hills of her ancestral home in San Mauro, Italy haunt even her earliest poems. Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s body of work resists the coming-of-age narrative that it often asserts. Mazziotti Gillan’s work also explicitly rejects the assimilation narrative that is often puts forth; in fact, Gillan’s poetry challenges fixed notions of American-ness by dramatizing the processes of remembrance so important to the construction of identity in traditional Italian American families. Mazziotti Gillan’s ultimate subject, therefore, is the remembering self.
When the Stars Were Still Visible centers the remembering self as it retraces and rewrites the concerns and the tropes that have constellated Mazziotti Gillan’s work since her collection Where I Come From was published in 1995. Readers of Mazziotti Gillan’s work will recognize a familiar cast of characters from her previous volumes: her immigrant parents, her husband, her son and daughter, beloved family members, friends, classmates, and the ghosts of Paterson and San Mauro. Similarly, the themes that thread throughout all Mazziotti Gillan’s previous books reassert themselves with remarkable clarity in When the Stars Were Still Visible, delivering another moving exploration of love, family, loss, and mortality. In the title poem, Mazziotti Gillan writes: “So many memories swirl / like bits of color in a kaleidoscope, / and so impossible to explain.” To full expression’s kaleidoscopic impossibility, Mazziotti Gillan holds up hundreds of shards of specific memories as shining and tightly-packed as the silver balls her Zio Guillermo made from the foil inside his Camel cigarette packs.
The poems that stand out the most in When the Stars Were Still Visible are the ones that either fill in an as yet poetically underexamined corner of the poet’s autobiography or feel like a resolution to a part of the poet’s autobiography that has supplied the material for many earlier poems. “Taking my Brother to the Barber” provides an example of the former kind of poem. In this poem, a sibling relationship spanning more than seventy-five years spirals out in a bittersweet aria ending on the brother’s huge dark uncomplaining eyes. “My Son the Lawyer Quotes Dylan Thomas to Give Me Courage” provides an example of the latter kind of poem. In poems from previous volumes, such as “Is This the Way It Is Between Mothers and Sons?” from All that Lies Between Us, Mazziotti Gillan has explored the distance between adult son and aging mother. However, in “My Son the Lawyer Quotes Dylan Thomas…” the distance collapses as the son reaches out to encourage his mother using the lines of the Welsh poet’s most famous villanelle. Just as many of her poems end in uplift, “My Son the Lawyer…” resolves (in uplift) the mother-son story arc that runs throughout her body of work.
In Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s poetry, her father forever whistles as he walks back home from an evening playing bocce and drinking wine at the Società Cilentana. Her mother forever places a bowl of steaming farina on the counter of the kitchen on 17th Street. Frank Sinatra’s voice forever booms from the jukebox in the basement of the student union at Seton Hall University. The popular girls in her seventh-grade class forever form a club called the Ritz Girls and go about their exclusionary work. She and her sister forever make paper dolls in the tiny closet of their room, unaware that it is what they don’t hold in their hands that will transform them. Her husband is there, young and handsome. Her children are there. The Paterson from her childhood is there, along with her parents and siblings. The sadness and weight of time are there. And so is a barely articulable lightness. She is singing. As she says in the poem “Last May in San Mauro, Cilento, 2017”: “I hold the memories close to give me comfort when I am most afraid.” Reading her work, I feel less afraid of aging and what comes after. I feel her warmth. I hear her singing. I see the stars over Paterson. What else could a reader ask for?