SINcerely Yours

Ferguson continuedfrom previous page Daughter mine, listen to the waves, and dance, daughter mine, dance! In contrast is the starkly literal Biagini's: Le stelle danzano la loro luce Il cielo notturno rabbrividisce. Ascoltando le onde, danza, figlia mia! — which hews strictly to Gioseffi's essence. Of particular note is the word rabbrividisce, which indeed means "shivers." Yet rabbrividisce would better be used to enhance the conveyance of a very difficult moment, it rumbles and slides so. So when then does meaning trump beauty? The answer: Whenever the author says. The dovetailing of Gioseffi's work is splendid . She keeps well to her views and conveys them consistently through the book's three sections. She never lets us forget that the real world is looming and that mystic Nature is the original wellspring of life. "Vases of Wombs" and "The Sea Hag and the Cave of Sleep," which takes us on a journey á la James Joyce (but without his spelling), intertwine well to initiate us into her vision. Yet she has already tempered this view in the first stanza of the first poem, "Music Is a Child of the Grass": "We live in the shadows of immense hands / like death that will take our sex away." When we arrive at "Some Slippery Afternoon," we find Gioseffi's communiqués change somewhat. They become directed more to the world at large, to more of her relatives, and more to the reader. The material is harsher, and generally less sensual. It is also where we are most fully shown that what is anathema to Gioseffi is mankind, which makes this section a hard read. Yet, like a skipping stone, she reminds us from time to time of her views of the true context of life. That the ways of Nature, for her, are the balm and surcease for the abundant cruelties of the world we are bom into, and which shape our own natures into something less than we would like for them to be. / sense a lost andprimitive priestess wandering in a walled city ofthe wrong century. In the end, we are allowed to meet the Gioseffi of today. Her self-image is now drawn in "Old Aphrodite Rises from Her Porcelain Tub," where we are shown how she has been completely wrought into the world and now deals with the fact that she is afraid of falling alone in her bathroom where no one would hear her— and yet still must live with man's devastations: and land mines are set to blow off legs of children running after butterflies in meadows. This third section is aptly called "Blood Autumn and the Peach." Aptly, because blood autumn speaks to ends, while a peach is a fruit that holds thé seed to be planted for the next life. And with a fine touch, she closes with "Orta Nova, Provincia di Puglia" ("New Orchard, Province of Puglia"), where her father was born. Where better to leave the seed for the next life? Perhaps since the world is such a mixed bag, we may be able to understand why Blood Autumn is such a mixed bag. From time to time the world comes straight at us. Other times, it makes no sense, and, on occasion, it reaches out to us with delicious subtlety. "This is what I am," the world says, and "This is my nature." Without excuse, artifice, or pretense, Gioseffi unveils her self to us and says the same. John Ferguson is a graduate ofthe American School in Rome and wrote this piece in Reggio, Italy. SINcerely Yours LindaAnn Loschiavo Mae West: It Ain't No Sin Simon Louvish Thomas Dunne Books http://www.thomasdunnebooks.com 512 pages; cloth, $26.95 America's vaudevillians and silent screen stars have found a voice across the Atlantic. Filmmaker Simon Louvish, an Israeli-Scot who lives in England, has penned sci-fi novels as well as four biographies ofclassic funnymen: W. C. Fields (Man on the Flying Trapeze: The Life and Times ofW. C. Fields [1997]), the Marx Brothers (Monkey Business: The Lives and Legends of the Marx Brothers [ 1 999]), Laurel and Hardy (Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy: The Double Life...