To Forget Venice

by Peg Boyers

To Forget Venice  is the improbable challenge and the title of Peg Boyers’s newest collection of poems. The site of several unforgettable years of her adolescence, the place she has returned to more frequently than any other, the city of Venice is both adored and reviled by the speakers in this varied and unconventionally polyphonic work. The voices we hear in these poems belong not only to characters like the mother of Tadzio (think  Death in Venice ), or the companion of Vladimir Ilych Lenin, or the Victorian prophet John Ruskin and his wife, Effie, but also to wall moss, and sand, and―most especially―an authorial speaker who in 1965, at age thirteen, landed in Venice and never quite recovered from the formative experiences that shaped her there. Ranging over several stages of a life that features adolescent heartbreak and betrayal, marriage and children, friendship and loss, the book insistently addresses the author’s desire to get to the bottom of her obsession with a place that has imprinted itself so profoundly on her consciousness.

Genres: Poetry

77 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Peg Boyers teaches poetry and translation at Skidmore College and at the Columbia University School of the Arts. She is the executive editor of Salmagundi Magazine and the author of three books of poetry published by the University of Chicago Press. One of those books, Hard Bread, is based on the life of Natalia Ginzburg.

Reviews

[Tristan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Competent and sincere, I should have liked this more than I did. Boyers' verse is readable and genuine but it didn't jump off the page the way I wanted it to. Boyers does a really good job embodying varieous historical and literary figures as well as her own life and her serious emotional connection to the city. I wish I had more to say, but my overall impression of the book was that it was lovely without being particularly able to stick with me. That being said, you might get a lot more out of it and Boyers' skill is high enough that I think checking her work out is well worth doing to see if it resonates.

[J]

Great prose, but the central theme of the collection is Venice, and I have never been there, have virtually no conception of it. I lack the context for many of these poems - shifting perspectives, varied voices. I have no connection to these allusions or themes, and so unfortunately I found it difficult to emotionally connect and don’t think any of this will stick with me.