Over the years, I have carefully followed Marc di Saverio’s work. I reviewed his first chapbook with Cactus Press, Sanatorium Songs, here (https://nprarchived.wordpress.com/2014/12/28/review-sanatorium-songs/), and made the following statements:
—[I]t’s . . . an incredible moment in our letters, for di Saverio has established —his talent almost flawlessly.
—In addition to the castle-like traditional forms, Sanatorium Songs contains —“freer” poems that are associational, iterative, inventive, metaphorical, and —frenetic.
—The poet’s audacity is impressive.
The review concludes with the following ovation: “di Saverio lays down his arms here. It’s facile to say that di Saverio is or will be a star; but he has written a book that’s unified, dexterous, wild, coursing, image-rich, and shining.”
Di Saverio followed up Sanatorium Songs with another chapbook, 2012’s The Sleeper and the Valley and Other Translations (Cactus Press); though I didn’t specifically review this book, I read it with admiration, for it continued in the modes di Saverio excels at (and which this review will develop further), namely translations from French into English, especially the Symbolists, and of Italian into English by way of Leopardi, one of the greatest Romanticists.
I covered 2013’s full-length version of Sanatorium Songs in CNQ (“This Charming Man”) and collected the piece in Constructive Negativity (Palimpsest Press, 2019), writing that “[i]t is one of the more important Canadian poetry debuts in the new century.” Such was my enthusiasm for di Saverio’s work in the first half of the 2010s that I subsequently published his The Love Songs of Crito di Volta in 2014 on Frog Hollow Press.
2017 brought two chapbooks of haiku, Jar of Fireflies from Inspiritus Press and Death Calls from Anstruther Press. I have no comment on these because I detest the form; I’m not quite sure why, and I recognize any kind of reaction of this sort is prejudicial. Yet I hate them, and I always will. Something about swatting gnats?
Also in 2017, di Saverio released his full-length book of Emile Nelligan translations called Ship of Gold with Véhicule. This is the text that marks di Saverio’s decline, one that, at the time, I didn’t comment on, though others did. Poet-critic Klara du Plessis deemed the book “archaic, overly dependent on standard representations of beauty and stock images of innocence to bolster the affective morbidity of much of the content.” Most egregious of all to me was the fact that the text was, as du Plessis commented, “haplessly copy-edited.” Not only did his talent fail di Saverio, but so did his editor, and it’s this failure that cannot be emphasized enough, for up until Ship of Gold, the bulk of di Saverio’s work was edited by (and culled by – a distinction we’d never be able to make by presence, only by absence) Jim Johnstone.[1] Not only was the disastrous Ship of Gold often (though not exclusively – there was powerful work inside) old-timey and boring, it had typos!
In 2020, di Saverio did himself rather heavy damage by publishing Crito di Volta, a so-called “epic poem” with Guernica. I covered this text myself and wrote things like:
—I thought, in 2020, we were at a point where an obviously odious book, an —outright stinker in the neomoralist realm, wouldn’t see the light of day at the level of a grant-dependent small press; that it couldn’t; that it was not —possible. I’m not arguing that, for example, racist material will never be —published again because we’re all better now; instead, I’m saying that I —figured it’d be more than tough for a state-sponsored book to reject —feminism and criticize movements like Black Lives Matter at the level of —direct statement . . . what is the magnitude of harm done when we suppress — political opinions not in alignment with our own? How many —neocolonialist wrongs will we perpetrate as we mop up the old system of — colonialism? From about 2015 on, I used to ask myself such questions idly —because a Canadian “offensive” book of poetry needed to appear before I —could actually think about the problem in real terms. Crito di Volta is this —book.
— [. . .m]uch of di Volta is terribly written.
—One gets a sinking feeling as one turns the pages of Crito di Volta that one —is progressing deeper into a representational hell. Not, of course, of the —Dantean kind, but rather of an uncontrolled, chaotic descent into a —paranoid madness replete with opinions that just will not play well with —CanLit’s current agony aunts.
And so on and so forth. More pertinently to the piece you are reading now, I also wrote: “The more one reads, the more one realizes that this book reflects an instability that cannot protect itself, of a vulnerability that is completely unguarded and (seemingly) wholly unprotected from an editorial standpoint.”
This brings us to 2021 and Aftersongs from Anstruther Press. Di Saverio is once again in Jim Johnstone’s hands, and the resultant improvement is dramatic. Indeed, the markers of improvement are discernible at a glance. Gone are the page-sprawling rants in favour of obviously regularized columnar and stanzaic verse; di Saverio has clearly been very carefully curated, and thereby protected from himself, making for a chapbook of a quality commensurate with his first two under Johnstone at Cactus Press. (This is not to say that overtly formalized verse is ‘better’ but in Saverio’s case it signals coherence and organization.) Important to note here is that Aftersongs is comprised of work that I suspect could have made it into Crito di Volta, but didn’t in favour of the latter’s mass dreck. Somehow, Johnstone was able to sort through the unpublished morass and salvage material far superior than the average page from Guernica’s Crito.
That the improvement is due to the editor is clear to me based on the aforementioned career-long observation of di Saverio; but a further elucidation must be made on di Saverio’s behalf. The poet often writes huge slabs of smooth, sonically dense verse that can adopt a pastoral or romantic mode. As Darren Bifford has observed in Arc Magazine, di Saverio is almost entirely a Romantic poet yet one who’s been somehow adulterated by, or is bending toward, modernism, and more specifically Ezra Pound. When di Saverio’s sonnets are picked through in bulk, one could inevitably find a dozen or so sublime pieces; this attests to di Saverio’s talent, and not his editorial skill, the disparity between which I haven’t witnessed since the likes of Milton Acorn. Thus “The Man With the Microchip in his Right Hand”, “Am I the Lone One Who Dreams of the Other”, and “Sonnet for my Father” all deliver perfect romantic sonnets that feature lines like these:
---I see, while teased by flower-blends in a breeze,
---it’s true: when we were one I could not dream
---since you were all of my expectancies
---arriving like this late summer moon-beam
---on your body . . .
They aren’t innovative, but they don’t have to be in di Saverio’s case. They just had to mark a return to form, and they do.
The same goes for his larger, baggier, thicker, pound-for-Poundian pieces that read almost air-tight to me. “Standing on Opposite Sides of the Stream Dividing the Ravine” and “Ode to My Discoverer” cram in as many adjectives and nouns in a line after a repetitive anaphoric pulse. The following is a representative sample:
---Dare we, now, dare we, brotherly recoverer of my life,
---lime-light-bringer-and-singer-for-moments, lime-light-blighter-
---and-ouster-for-moments, wisely tired of fame before the fame
---is won?
---Dare we, now, dare we burst forth like two myriad-mile darts
---of light that beam towards the bulls-eye of the far-flung orbits
---of the Kingdom, our target?
Of course the book also has a translation of de Nerval. Of course it has a haiku. Di Saverio will never be Bowie, Dylan, Madonna, Lady Bey, shifting his persona and style over the years. Instead, he’s an ossified electrified Romantic OR a permanently winsome Imagiste, and he’ll likely write the same way for the rest of his life. When delivered by this particular editor, di Saverio’s strengths show, and the glimmer of a possibility of a perfect book, distilled at the end of di Saverio’s life as a Selected Poems, comes into view. I truly hope that vision is realized one day.
It won’t happen, though, if di Saverio doesn’t work with an editor who can manage him. My hope is that a talent this unguarded and profligate can find its way into the right harness. Otherwise, the next book will feel like I’m reading the tirades in Milton Acorn’s More Poems for People, interspersed with blocks of sublimity that only make one wince all the more for their beauty that’s marred-by-association.
[1] Full disclosure: Jim and I are friends and colleagues.
Shane Neilson is a poet, physician, and critic who published Constructive Negativity, a book of evaluative criticism, with Palimpsest Press in 2019.
The Woodlot 