American Woman, Italian Style: Italian Americana's Best Writings on Women

Mary di Michele’s Elegies

Mary di Michele’s Elegies nathalie cooke 1991 In her poetry, the Italian-Canadian Mary di Michele explores various issues of marginality, asking questions about the language and forms she must use as a doubly marginal writer, and questions about her audience. As I have argued elsewhere,1 these concerns figure prominently in her confessional poems, where she defines center and margin in terms of her own personal experience. But if confession is one answer di Michele provides to the question , ‘‘How must a marginal writer speak?’’ elegy is another. Together, these two forms dominated her earlier poems, especially those personal poems that dealt with her legacy as an Italian-Canadian. However, it is elegy that emerges as the central form in Luminous Emergencies, her sixth volume of poetry. In this collection, the poet is no longer one who speaks the confession , but one who listens to it. She bears witness to atrocities against humanity in poems that mourn the loss of life and contemporary violations against human decency. In this paper I want to trace the elegiac strain in di Michele’s poetry, from its focus on personal loss to its more recent focus on broader political issues. Early on, the focus of di Michele’s narrative of loss is specific: on family and Italy, the family home and homeland. Gradually, however, the narrative’s focus becomes broader until, in Luminous Emergencies, the elegiac form is transformed from the poet’s mourning the loss of a specific person or place, to her mourning a loss that is so universal, so enormous in its scope, that the poet’s task is to personalize it. Nostalgia In her earlier work, di Michele uses elegy to articulate the immigrant experience . For instance, the parents of the speaker in di Michele’s poems see 232 Mary di Michele’s Elegies 233 their lives in terms of the loss of paradise. Italy—for all the difficulty of life there: the hard work, the poor pay, the tipping of one’s hat to ‘‘Don Soand -So/in order to eat or get a job’’2 —is the Land of Mimosa. It is their first paradise, lost to them because of their quest for a better life for their children. A second paradise is the home they make in Canada with their two young children. Described as a garden in such poems as ‘‘Bread and Chocolate ’’ and ‘‘Mimosa,’’ the comparison between the poet’s childhood home and a paradisal existence is made explicit. ‘‘There is only one heaven,’’ the poet explains, ‘‘the heaven of the home.’’ However, their new-world paradise is soon tarnished by time and circumstance: their child is transformed from a ‘‘golden girl’’ into a prodigal daughter, and they, in turn, become tired and dissatisfied. The shift from the descriptive to the elegiac is signaled by a shift from the present to the past tense. There is only one heaven, the heaven of the home. There was only one paradise, the garden that kept them little children even as adults, until one angel, Lucia, his luckless offspring fell, refusing to share in his light. (M, 1, emphasis added) Of course, Lucia (the prodigal daughter) leaves the family paradise just as her parents before her had left the land of Mimosa—consciously. As the verbal echoes of Milton’s Paradise Lost suggest here, both generations undergo a ‘‘fall’’ as a function of some conscious decision. For the first-generation immigrants in these elegies, however, there is also a sense of exile. As Vito finds, sitting under the heaven he has made of green fiberglass in contemporary Toronto, paradise is somehow lost to the inhabitants of the new world. Nostalgic , he remembers the sweetness of Mimosa, and of days gone by. The loss felt by his poet daughter, Lucia, is different, and parallels the central concern of all di Michele’s elegies: despite her rebellion, she mourns the lack of communication in her family. In particular, Lucia is troubled by her own inability to communicate with her father. I have to settle things with my father before the year is dead. It’s about time we tried talking person to person. More than a tired man, my father is such a lonely, disappointed man. 234 Nathalie Cooke He has learned through many years of keeping his mouth shut to say nothing. (M, 14) Even when Lucia does talk...