Whisper loudly that, with this review of Grace Cavalieri’s
long poem Showboat, her 21st
collection of poetry, the Dresser has phoenix-ed the Scene4 Magazine blog The Dressing.
Grace Cavalieri’s Showboat has arresting wires to The Odyssey, the Greek epic poem attributed to Homer, the mythological tome that tracks the hero Odysseus’ dangerous trek home from the fall of Troy. Cavalieri’s sets up her story of being a US Navy pilot’s wife with three quotes that speak to her subsequent approach which mixes low and high art. No where in these lines by American country singer Dolly Parton, German mystic poet Angelus Silesius, and the multi-award-winning American poet Bob Hicok has she tossed the reader a hook alluding to The Odyssey. However, the back cover of this chapbook pulls one up short with this stanza from the poem:
Asleep in the dark whatever may happen
He’s flying over a postage stamp
Landing on a dime without a light
The phone rings a
voice says
I know your husband’s gone
I know you’re alone
I’m watching you
…
Cavalieri’s stanza 34 echoes how Penelope, who was true to
her husband Odysseus and worried for his life, had to deal with unwanted
attention from would-be suitors.
At stanza 28, Cavalieri readies the reader for the more overt
Greek epic poem connection when she reveals that while she is waiting for the
return of her larger-than-life, war-fighting pilot husband, she is reading—to
her young daughters, no less—Kazantzakis, the Greek author who wrote Zorba, the Greek and who was nominated
nine times for a Nobel Prize without winning one. Something Cavalieri, who has
promoted thousands of poets through her remarkable
42-year-old radio program “The Poet and the Poem” without a whiff of prize
recognition, might be willing to speak to.
How to be selective
to live till age 50
My hair up in a barrette
waiting
For the mailman
Shelley eats chocolate ice cream
Colleen vanilla with chocolate syrup
Cindy paints on small chairs
Angel listens as I read
Teilhard de Chardin
Her first steps toddle to the French masters
Running with Kazantzakis
At stanza 73 out of a total of 75, the poet questions, “How could
I a frightened/ Traveler be given so much/ should I list his love…” as well as “How
could he be dead/ If his clothes/ Hang in the closet and every day/ I lay out a
clean shirt in/ Case it’s needed”. While Penelope busied herself with weaving a
shroud for Odysseus' elderly father Laertes to ward off the Suitors, Cavalieri ever true to her husband
Ken continues to lay out his clothes for the man who came home alive and whole
from his life as a Navy pilot, grew old with her (he too as artist--metal sculptor), and then died. Women have
always been associated with fabric as a metaphor for relationship, as the way women take care of their men.
Cavalieri opens and closes her epic poem by setting the
telling of the work in a retreat house in New Hampshire. (She in fact has become the Traveler.) The precursor stanza, appearing
alone before the poem starts (call it Stanza 0), reads like a mysterious proem
where birds stand in for the jets Ken flew and the poet is “Pressed against the
pane” (or should we read "pain"?), a line that seems to refer to
stanza 30 “Women have windows/ From the beginning/ For good reason Mary Ellen
and I flew…”. At the end of Showboat,
the poet re-evokes New Hampshire and the window pane, writing it is “cracked
from the course of time/ It’s just the brink of the abyss/ follies of stained
glass”. No reason to stop here, Dear Reader, other themes abound in this
surprising, pointillistic poem with artwork by Dan Murano and Cynthia Cavalieri.
Grace Cavalieri is Maryland’s tenth Poet Laureate and Showboat is her 21st collection of
poetry. Goss183, an artist collective, has published Showboat.