Happy 10th! Eugene McNamara on For As Far As The Eye Can See and Straight Razor and Other Poems

For me two Biblioasis books that touched me where I live were collections of poems.

The first is Salvatore Ala's Straight Razor and Other Poems (2004).  These poems resonate with love: for his father, mother, grandmother, wife, children and sacred places. Windsor, Tuscany, Sicily.


Beginning with Frank Ala's barber shop. The poems roam far away but always come back.

Dennis Priebe's design and typesetting make a beautiful rendering of Sal's words in space. It is a wonderful thing to hold as well as read,

The second book that hit me where I live is Robert Melancon's For As Far As the Eye Can See (2013). Elegantly translated into English these poems are deep in the author's Quebec and afford someone like me who only knows that belle province from visits to Montreal a deep insight into lived life.

Both of these collections begin with geographic specifics but both poets lead us from there to the universal.

A friend of mine sometimes thanks me for "juice" gleaned from reading my poems. Both of these books do that for me. Thank you for them.

One Question Interview: Salvatore Ala

Over at Alex Boyd's blog, he has conducted a one question interview with Biblioasis poet Salvatore Ala:

While your poems in Lost Luggage certainly have intellectual ideas in them, they’re grounded in some very organic imagery: fish, dragonflies, almonds, rain barrels, pine, fog and snow, crabapple wine. Considering your title, is it fair to say your book is at least partly about how we’ve left something important behind in modern, everyday life?

When I look back at poems I didn’t include in the final manuscript, this sense of having “left something important behind in modern, everyday life” is even more apparent. I was trying to strike a metaphorical balance, but as you know these ruminations are subtle. The past is very much part of the present in this collection, though I would add that some poems which do not appear on the surface to be part of the motif of having "left something important behind…” are in fact also about lost origins. Working from the etymology of words is for me a way of seeing what’s not there, and is very often the source of the imagery in a poem. “Ala,” “Church Demolition,” and “Roman Coins” are very much poems about lost or uncertain origins. I was also able to question value and judge hypocrisy with the strongest evidence being in the roots of the words themselves.

For the rest of Ala's response, please go here.