This Way Out

by Carmine Starnino

Carmine Starnino’s latest collection of poems is full of lyrical escapes, exits and embarkations that set out to measure degrees of belonging and proximity to being at home. With his close attention to sound and ease of comparison, Starnino tries on voices and costumes for size, revisiting his childhood stomping grounds and current neighbourhood bars, reliving teenage haircuts and marvelling at the skill of the local butcher. Counterbalancing his own search for place, Starnino delights in locating in other people and favourite objects their aptitude for simply being themselves. “Nine from Rome” is a series of verse letters written to fellow poets during a sojourn in Italy. Here the poet tests the novelty of new sights and sounds against the sensibilities of his poetics. Inspired in part by the letters of Catullus, the series conjours sunny balconies, food markets and aqueducts, and revels in the escape from routine. This Way Out closes with “The Strangest Things,” a series of those things for which, William Carlos Williams says, “One has emotions.” A particular fence post, the scent of a woman’s perfume in the Metro, a ball floating in a canal–contained in these are tangible moments of self-discovery. In some of his most candid work to date, Starnino reflects on his own attempts to hit a stride and secure a sense of belonging. “As a child of immigrants, my sense of being lost between competing origins and tongues can be intense,” Starnino says. “What this in-betweenness often creates, rather unexpectedly, is a feeling of being set apart, of existing as a foreigner in one’s own country. What it also contributes to is a ‘several selves’ my life defined not only by the reality it inhabits, but also the potential existences it did not fulfill. This clash of geographical rootedness and psychological uprootedness is, in large part, what I wanted to explore in This Way Out. Whether the setting is the Italian north-end where I grew up, or the multi-ethnic Parc-Ex neighbourhood where my wife and I lived, or our six-month junket to Rome, the book expresses a nostalgia for a home in poems of linguistic restlessness, poems where the language always has somewhere else it wants to go. By using doubletalk and euphemism, subtext and suggestiveness, bilingual fluidity and impurities of diction, I wanted to write poems that could tell me who I was and where I belonged. Taking the hint from Northrop Frye’s famous question Where is here?, ‘here’–these new poems answer–is always ‘elsewhere’.” Finalist for the 2009 Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry.

Genres: Poetry, Canada

75 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2009

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nearly put me off sleep for good, so high,
distressed and unrelenting was the sound.
But then, isn't that the point, that it begged
to be heard? Across the alley, behind a fence
with around-the-clock junk, an animal
pled its case: nicotine-yellow, upthrust rump,
heart-shaped face trapped in a bestial, blunt,
eyes-shut rendition of lust. Like the first
salt taste of a woman: the scream of my body
hormonally deranged. Unsprayed, unsalted,
singing its song of woe, of whoa, an a cappella
punk yodel that dogged me back to bed.

- Shag, pg. 16

* * *

Corkscrew staircases, triplexes, satellite
dishes. Such riches as oranges - buck-fifty
a pound - piled on slats, under awnings,
and south of rue Oglivy's stretch
of family-run sweet-shops and delis:
Pêcherie Mairmais, where, head to tail,
cod cool on crushed ice. A good price.

It suits me down to the ground, this place
of sodium-lit nowhereness between
Jean-Talon and St. Roch. Its eighteen-
nineteenths of a toehold on the world.
Flattops beside flattops, planted
in acres of concrete -- ungentrified
Eden at the brink of the sticks: Parc Ex,

God said, and up sprang sidestreets of shoebox
flats (plus rats), chain-link fences, plain-
penny bricks, and paint-splashed garages.
After that, rust-odoured alleys
where balding towels and pink panties
drip dry together like arranged marriages.
Then Bengali protest posters


and weekend cricket until rain stops play.
Next day, the big-watt rap of double-
parked cars, subfusc bars, sari-clad girls
playing hula hoop, and 2 + 2 = 5
sprayed in red by some effin'
idiot on the hoof. By week's end,
God called forth empty produce boxes

stacked outside Marché SPG,
and me dashing out the Steve's, low on milk.
God saw it was good: our fourth floor
bolt-hole with a crow's-nest view,
cigarette reek rising from below,
my paper heisted every morning,
and muezzin calls from speakers

next door. There's more: the beslippered
Greek men in wife-beaters
like off-broadway Brandos, the Syrian
barbershop brothers in all-weather
flipflops, the Dollarama shopping sprees
paid out in small change, the leaves
that rallied into piles and fought

the wind to a standstill, the spice smells,
the tea-coloured strays, the take-home Bombay,
and the half-chugged bottles of plonk
and beer I saw clear an open window.
De Liège in the morning splodged
with crash landings, brown interbled
with the dregs of lives close-quartered

in this burg, this case study in eyesores,
this last word in slumlords, this warren
of walk-ups where the wallpaper's
forever airing out its smell. Hell
or fresh start: a room, a roof, a wage.
And everyone too tired to hold out
for better. The price paid for a new story

of creation: tatted up Sikhs,
bicycling knife-sharpeners, and Bollywood actors,
just off the boat. We are counted
one by one into this dead end,
where the bandwidth's slow and we speak
not speech but yeses and nos that add up
to a scoop of that, a pound of this. What bliss.

- This Way Out, pg. 19-21

* * *

The day dressed in brackish hints, morning after
we grill one-inch salmon steaks

- hiss-sputter of fat
sperm-whitening on flame. We wake downwind of dishes

unwashed, slick with marinade
and the night-long bestirring of juices

humidity now uses to goose air
wild with ripeness, morning after

not quite reek, but food-funk
butterfish smelt-spores

like sun's trace on face, arms, and legs;
or milk, left, pleasing itself.

Waking, too, to an authorless odour
quoted all around us

then suddenly cited: sweated-in staleness of leather sandals
flung in a corner, morning after

we wear nothing but garlic on our fingers,
a touch that always rubs off.

- Morning-After, pg. 46

* * *

Herb's death-bed sleep
at an open window.
Piled in a pan, clipped stems
join like eyelids.
Two days, and colour
keeps up appearances,
outlives the fragrance
tipped out and tapped
to empty. I think of the man
who was healed, took up his bed
and walked away.
We wait, watch the road's
production line of dust,
bereavement's run-off,
noon heat and summer light.
Fixed on degrees
of dwindling, a lush memory
replaces the desiccated,
cymbal-shake of leaves
you life, surprised.
So discreetly did it happen
we hadn't noticed
they dried right through.

- Pimpinella, pg. 58

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

I borrowed Carmino Starnino's "This Way Out" from the library on a whim - I liked the cover (in person, much less saturated than the image on its Goodreads page), and know that Gaspreau Press puts out some pretty cool book.

It was a good choice. While I have never been to Montreal or Rome, and know there's a lot in Starnino's poems I don't understand, they were still a very good read. He's masterful with language, and has some especially lovely endings to his poems. For example, this ending of "Smell of Something Bad, Kitchen" in The Strangest Things.

"Lie low. Shed everything
for the lesson
of seeing it go. And so,
and so."

If I had to pick one poem as the one that impacted me the most, it would be "Lucky Me." I think that most of us, as we grow up, gain new perspective on our childhoods. "Lucky Me" is a skillful depiction of that.