The Collector

The Collector Louis McKee American HGVlEW Day Mark Lee Briccetti Four Way Books http://www.fourwaybooks.com 96 pages; paper, $14.95 Lee Briccetti is a collector: things, people, places, moments. She gathers all with pleasure, and not a bit of guilt, clearly takingjoy in simply having. These collectibles show up in her poems the way trinkets and relics do, bits and pieces, in the boxes of Joseph Cornell; and collecting can itself serve as a motif in her work: My friend, the Haitian painter, renders forms over erased forms: African hair knots and braids captioned by idiomatic phrases in lolling script—black sheep, black magic, blackmail. Her letterforms droop like long necks of dying tulips, the script itself collections of still lives— limp doves and game birds. An important collector in New York has discovered and collects her. Meanwhile, she goes on collecting shoeshine boxes, thirty of which she exhibits on glass shelves. When urged to talk about the politics of her collecting she only says, "Shapes and enclosures interest me." Born in Italy and raised in the States, currently residing in NYC (where for more than fifteen years she has directed Poets House, the huge poetry archive and sanctuary), Briccetti's eye is European, but her spirit is American, inclusive, democratic—embracing , the way Whitman's is: The trattoria padrone in Siracusa explains his philosophy of life based on experiences in Greenwich Village in the American '60s washing mountains and mountains of plates; fourteen hours a day on his feet scraping platters into the trash. "Don't do it," he says to Carlo, who has told him everything, "don't move there! You think you're learning English but you're washing a thousand-million plates, no singing or pleasure, no gentilezza at all." Padrone lost an index finger on the Alaskan pipeline which finally, after twenty miserable years, made him American bucks. "You have to lose a part of yourself," he lectures, shaking his stub at the icy barracks and the tenements in Queens which suffocated his youth. "A thousand-million plates, the phrase follows us like a stray dog / into our married lives," says Briccetti. Throughout the bookand beyond, we know. Another collection. Briccetti is one of the more ambitious and far-reaching of the emerging generation ofAmerican poets. Her work can be difficult at times, but is never self-indulgent. Complex narratives are crafted in clear, clean language — crisp, vivid, lyrical. She approaches her subject matter—Rome and New York, love, marriage, and the angst of a new century dawning—with grace, wit, and a quiet, subtle passion. "Robert DeNiro speaking Italian...". In the movie version of my greatest adventure he plays Carlo and wears the black leather overalls with the little zippers I love and we put on helmets and breeze off on his motorcycle— This may be a first book, but it would be difficult to tell; there is no uncertainty here, nothing tentative in the language, the music, or the thought, but rather one picks up on a kind ofcomfort, ofease, a sense of confidence and cool, in these sure-footed lines. In "Day Mark," the title poem of the volume, Briccetti recounts a version of 9/ 1 1: During the evacuation I walked up the thirty-six floors in a darkness so utter the world no longer existed. Voices, slammed firedoors, above and below, fear, the smell of burning fuel. Later, she tells us, "There is a blister on my mind. / 1 agree to that." Easier said than done, the acceptance, the agreements we make to pass through a scene. More to the point: Time, a membrane we both slipped through, into the next moment when I could scream. Briccetti is one ofthe more ambitious andfar-reaching ofthe emerging generation ofAmerican poets. The city, the times, can be dark, but there is light too. An unmistakable optimism burns like a candle in the window throughout the book. "[T]here was a woman who found herself in a box of old photographs... ." The collector holds on to things unaware that one day she may look into a box of poems, a collection of moments, and find herself. "Everyone who collects recollects some...