Works and Days

by Edward Kleinschmidt Mayes, Mayes Kleinschmidt, Edward Kleinschmidt

Edward Kleinschmidt Mayes carouses -- playfully, deliciously -- through the Italian countryside with his latest collection of poems. Like Hesiod's Works and Days, Mayes's collection explores the art of living and the transformations of one's life while working the land as a farmer. In his hand, the ecstatic and elegiac meet, often shifting between a wide-angle lens to the immediacy of the kitchen table, from Newton's revelations to the death of his parents.This book is written as an abecedarius: each poem's Italian title begins with a different letter of the alphabet, from Ago (needle) to Zappa (hoe). Often beginning a poem on the word that ended the last, Mayes strings his readers along on denotation and double meaning -- slight detours that take us from here to there, from Ovid shouting at his dog to our eternal quarrel with time. We follow this poet and his words, delighting in the movement, continually transported by sudden evocations of emotion that hit close to the heart. Mayes, known for his complex play with linguistic roots and for hard-driving tensile forms, extends his reach into the Italian language. As he farms his little plot of Tuscan soil, he introduces Italian phrases with a sense of wonder and pleasure, reminding us of our attraction for the word -- imagination made flesh. He comes to realize that his "fields are poetry and olives, " and his furrows and lines are seeded with Dante, and Virgil, Robert Johnson, and Jussi Bjorling.

Genres: Poetry

59 pages, Paperback

First published December 15, 1999

Reviews

[Darrell · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's more like a 3.75. I think I see techniques that Edward Mayes is utilizing. The separation of speaker as self by having the text littered in Italian, but trying to gain a connection by using a word in Italian in a poem to be the title of the next poem. However, there are moments when the technique is overly stated -- just like most of the work -- the allusions are overly stated (Keats said this...Virgil did this)...however I did enjoy some of the subtlety of poems like Io (where the reference to Io the god is denounced).

Overall, I thought this was a pretty good poetry book. I can see how it won the Pitt Series in Poetry -- but at the same time I felt none of the poems (maybe Io) could stand on their own or be memorable (too much homage to the canon without twisting it...although "Uva" was a decent attempt, but 1/20...).

I would like to say that it might be just me...maybe I'm reading the poems wrong or what not...so take this quasi review with a grain of salt.