Italian Women in Black Dresses. Maria Mazziotti Gillan. Guernica, 2002. pp.142

This collection is Maria Mazziottti Gillan's third, and it comes after Where I Come From (Guernica, 1995) and Things My Mother Told Me (Guernica, 1999). As the titles suggest, all three derive their subjects and their strength from family and ethnic identification. Gillan, a poet, English professor, and director of the Poetry Center at Passaic CCC in Paterson,NY, is also--her poems say--a granddaughter, daughter, wife, mother and sister, and a second generation Italian-American of Sicilian descent--the immigrant generation being the first. Gillan tells us about the joys and griefs inherent in our commitments to other people, family and friends, and in the precariousness of the human condition. She also details the struggles of who she was, who she is, vis-à-vis the dominant culture, the ambiguities and, at times, the self-hate, and how she came, in middle age, to embrace herself with her whole heart, and with herself, the women she came from. Or at least, to put that acceptance into words.

Italian Women in Black Dresses, a collection of prose poems and easy-going free-verse, reads like a memoir and starts appropriately with the poem "Black Dresses":

I dress now all in black like the old ladies
of my childhood, the old ladies who watched

our movements and reported to our mothers
if we did anything wrong. These women, sitting

on their stoops in their shiny black cotton, their black
stockings rolled down to just below their knees,

their sparse, white hair drawn back into a bun, wisps
of it escaping onto their foreheads.

Dark clothes, not just black, have many cultural and social connotations in Southern Italian communities. Women wore black for mourning, and working class women usually wore nothing but dark shades--dark brown, dark blue, dark grey, dark green. Utilitarian shades which did not show the dirt, and, for every day, in fabrics and finishes that were not fussy or showy, the bright colors being reserved for the young unmarrieds, or for women who wanted to attract attention. Like the old women of her childhood, the speaker of the poems also wears nothing but black now, the mourning clothes put on after one relative dies and never taken off after a certain age as more close family members die one after the other.

She has also become one of the women who tells the secrets "whispered among women,/ the secrets they held close to them, these women / who were there for one another."

"I've told in my poems," she says, "secrets/ I could never have told to anyone else/ not face to face, not in person ... " writing a way of understanding, of integrating that understanding into everyday life, of dealing with and erasing what hurts--"the memory of (a) shameful moment/ of cowardice or guilt (So Many Secrets p.63). And a way of becoming a more compassionate person, toward others and toward oneself. The other, perhaps, dismissed because little understood, too foreign or strange in the society to which she aspired, into which she wanted to escape. Or simply dismissed because the young insist on starting anew, looking out and away from where they are.

In colloquial language, she tells stories that span generations, using details from her life and her neighborhood to weave intricate patterns, and a tapestry of relationships--for that's always the focus of the story--where the speaker is at that particular moment in a particular relationship, with others or with herself. These very accessible poems are marked by sentiment but no sentimentality. Eyes wide open, she sees and records every thing, not shying away from the unflattering or even the disgusting detail, and facing up to what she feels even when far from what's expected. She's so honest in her search, and humorous, that we feel rewarded when we read her work. I'm going to end this short review by quoting in full, "Learning How to Love Myself," which exemplifies much of what I have been saying.

My hair is dark black and electric. Left to itself
it would spring off my head in ringlets. I could never

control it, not when I was growing up. It stuck out
from my head like a kinky tent. My legs are stumpy

and thick, the knees swollen, the veins protruding.
My small feet are wide and my body is planted

on the ground like a fat shrub. When I sit
on a high stool in the TV station, I see my short,

sturdy legs, my thick body that carries me along,
unstoppable into my life, this peasant body.

For years, I longed for the slender grace
of a long body, tall and supple as marsh grass,

but would not give up this incredible energy,
the heat that pours from the furnace of my body,

the long line of women who taught me to laugh
my deep belly laugh and grab the world

in my arms and squeeze the sweetness out.