In his tenth volume of poetry to date—Sing Me a Song, She Said—acclaimed poet and biographer extraordinaire Paul Mariani (born in 1940) delves into his childhood and youth in a working-class family in New York City, his evolving relationship with reading and writing, often with spiritual resonance, and—with arresting candor—the tribulations of old age.

“City Roofs, 1932,” from Part I, is a moving depiction of New York City with its “red-brick chimney stacks” and “tar-splayed buckled roofs,” language whose heavy stresses skillfully evoke the hardness of the city in the middle of the Depression. It is a bleak and brutal place as the poet recalls his father’s story of the cops flinging “some poor Black kid off as he tried to hide / behind a brick chimney in the shadow of the El.” But out of this milieu also came his own initiation into religion when the poet struggles to “summon up once more / that boy (long gone) in black knickers / and starched white shirt…that warm spring day he made his First / Communion.”

The poverty of Mariani’s childhood is gracefully recalled with the speaker’s desire for honey-baked ham with its ironic allusion to the myth of Tantalus but also a suggestion of the sacred in sensuous language, an important element of Mariani’s poetics:

...like the incense 

of that baked ham slowly simmering beyond those
gray forbidding walls. Something open-handed
and yet close-fisted, something welcoming, teasing you
as you stood out there in the winter dusk
as that sweet smell wafted on and on all over you.

The poem “Word by Word” evokes his own beginnings as a scholar and the poet to-be, with often sacramental overtones in which God Himself seems to be the speaker:

Listen, son, for it is I

who have placed my words in your heart
and on your lips. For this is why I called you,
though it has taken you all these years
to understand this...
words you learned
to fashion with crayon, pencil and pen, and later
with typewriter and computer, shaping world after
world as the words went spilling forth.

The formal elegance of Mariani’s verse is outstanding throughout the collection—as in the exquisite “Elegy for Emely” in which the poet grieves the death of his sister to cancer, imagining her in her deathbed and recalling their life together with a rich resonance of feeling and even delicate gravity, as in these beautiful lines consisting of rhymed quatrains:

Once more the leaves are falling. Summer’s
gone like some evicted tenant, and the light
we loved keeps fading with each day. The sun
clicks left a little more each evening, and the bright

notes of jays and finches that flocked last week
about our feeders have left for warmer climes.
And so it goes, as it has forever. And as the light
grows shorter, those crickets that kept time

with the katydids have packed up their strings
and violas and departed. And now my dear
sister lies sleeping in her bed three thousand
miles away, the morphine flowing through her

as her family and the nurse attend her needs
while the hours and weeks drone on and on.
Our lone warrior has grown silent now, tucked tight
in her cocoon.

“That Old Plastic Turtle Bowl Assembly Line” is another excellent poem in which the poet excels at narrative as he recalls working at a factory as an 18-year-old college student cranking out from a horrible machine these grotesque plastic bowls and is thrilled to be fired by his martinet boss comically named Alley Oop, it seems, when the contraption suddenly “coughed  / and sighed then died:” His only solace at the time was reading Dante’s Inferno, whose influence is clearly palpable in the last poem of the collection, entitled “Dante in Paradise.”

And then at last a page of the Inferno

and a mug of coffee until I dozed off at my desk.
But it was the books that kept me going, each page,
yes, each sentence, another taste of freedom, a way
of blanking out those clanking clunks that meant to kill me.

And then, one bleak night, as grace would have it,
arrived a way out of this manmade hell,
when somehow the manic turtle bowl machine
began to chug and clog with hot plastic vomit
as I watched with awe and wonder as on it coughed
and sighed then died while I cheered it on.

Part II consists of its namesake verse drama “Sing Me a Song, She Said,” that explores the conflicts and troubles of Mariani’s large working-class home in New York City during the 1950s. There’s the abusive father who pushes his wife “roughly aside” and smashes the son’s (i.e., the poet’s) face when he confronts him, “refusing to cower.” The father is no simple ogre, nonetheless. There’s a certain charm to the bellicose crudeness of this asphalt-layer and WWII veteran when he responds to the son’s heady philosophical discussion about love:

So, what have you learned about love?
And what the hell do a bunch
of Greek geezers know about love?
Any of ’em break their backs to make
ends meet for a kid who can’t even get
home on time? Kid’s got too much moxie.

Father is clearly not impressed by his studious son’s showiness of formal learning, for he values more life’s gritty lessons than the tomes in a library. I take delight in how the poet pokes fun at his youthful self-importance. He cannot wait to get away from this tumultuous household, but he evidently loves his family and acknowledges its importance to his life and his art.

Walter is the hard-drinking, wayward brother, heir to the father’s crudeness, who gets some of the swingiest lines (in monorhyme, no less) as in these from “Walter’s Song”:

Blah blah blah blah. Christ, give me a break.
Family first. Yeah. Right. What a fake.
He says let me help you, but what he does is take.
So lovin’ and tender, makes my poor mother quake.

Sits down at the table. Glares at my brother and me.
Chomps on his chow, just as mean as can be,
Thinkin’ lazy-ass kids who think food is free.
Forgettin’ us acorns don’t fall far from the tree.

The tragic figure of the play is the Mother, a beautiful and gifted singer, who holds the family together by appeasing her husband and supporting their children. Her frustration and her suffering over a road-rage incident caused by him are evoked vividly in “Sunday Afternoon on the Jones Beach Causeway, 1951”:

And there he was, our father, leaning
on his horn as someone tried to inch
around him. Then that someone shouting
through the window, mom pleading
to let it go, my father out the door, staring
the guy down—get back to your fucking car,
and the guy back in his car, all of us stuck there,
father behind the wheel, smiling as if vindicated.…

Sixty years, sixty years, and still I see her,
lips pale and shaken as we sat there
stunned and silent. By then the music
on the radio was gone. Gone too the song
she had been singing, ground down again
to a sound like ball bearings scraping.

Part III, with its nod to Pound in the subtitle “News That Stays News,” offers a panorama of poems in meter and rhyme exploring contemporary events like the COVID pandemic, the poet’s Christian faith, and the losses and degradations of old age together with the hard-won wisdom that growing old affords. This last section is rich with spirituality—as in “That Early-Eastering Crocus,” with its echoes of G.M. Hopkins, which meditates on those fleeing moments of grace in our everyday lives:

And, in truth, isn’t this the way grace works?
The incessant weight of each day’s news, the wars,
the famines, those daily losses, the sadness of it all,
and the little we can do to change it, though God
knows I pray about it every single day. But then

you catch those grace notes singing silently about us—
a child’s smile, my dear wife’s Irish soda bread
fresh baked for breakfast, a neighbor smiling
from across the way, the sudden play of sunshine,
these trees about to stretch out buds, good news
emails from your grandkids, and the royal
purple of that single crocus calling out to you.

Paul Mariani’s Sing Me a Song, She Said is undoubtedly a superlative and varied collection from a master poet still in his prime and one of our most gifted practitioners of traditional verse in all its myriad forms.

Orlando Ricardo Menes is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Notre Dame and the author of eight poetry collections, including The Gospel of Wildflowers &Weeds (2022), Memoria (2019), Heresies (2015), and Fetish (2013), winner of the 2012 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. His next poetry collection, entitled Origins, will be published by Slant Books in 2027. 

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