Like Branches to Wind:  Poems 2004 / A Prayer in a Wolf’s Mouth:  Poems of South India, 2013-14
by Richard Milazzo.

Two-Volume Boxed Set:
First edition paperbacks: January 2015.
Designed by Richard Milazzo.
Volume 1:  88 pages, with a 2-colour gatefold jacket, a black and white photograph of the author, Paris, June 2004, by Joy L. Glass on the frontispiece, with reproductions of 32 watercolors by Charles Clough, a preface by the author and a note by the artist.

Volume 2:  96 pages, with a 2-colour gatefold jacket, a black and white photograph of the author, Hotel Metropole, Mysore, India, July 22, 2013, by Joy L. Glass on the frontispiece.
7.5 x 4.5 x .8 in., printed, sewn and bound in Turin, Italy.
ISBN-13:  978-88-905385-4-4.
ISBN-13:  978-88-905385-5-1.
Published by Lower Canal Books, Cumiana, Italy, 2015.

RETAIL PRICE: $30.00 (includes postage and handling)

In Like Branches to Wind:  Poems 2004, Richard Milazzo writes:  “The poems, my poetry in general, often rely on the physical elements and basic emotions (however we may paradoxically define such complex things) to tell their ‘stories’ – and there is the predilection itself in them to tell stories, which is, in my opinion, the most elemental of all human impulses, all enterprises.  The pseudo sonnet form of three stanzas of four lines each – the minimum formal threshold of each poem – is nothing more than an excuse to reinstate the classical (or anti-postmodern) idea of a beginning, middle and ending for each story-telling poem […]

“But for all of their penchant to tell a story, they often strike an abstract note, reaching for something beyond the purely  elemental.  Having this abstract dimension of things in common with Charles Clough’s work in general, as well as the date in relation to this particular body of work (2004), the collaboration seemed like an ideal ‘marriage of reason and squalor’!  In their combining narrative and lyrical, story-telling or representational and abstract components, they seemed to complement each other perfectly […]

“If Clough sees his method of working as ‘representational of style,’ in so far as his inclination is to reference other artist’s styles and styles of representation in these works on paper – a very postmodern methodology, if ever there was one –, thusly effecting a meta-style or what he identifies as an instance of pareidolia (the syndrome of seeing the familiar in the unfamiliar, as in seeing the face of God unexpectedly in the water stains of a bed sheet drying in the breeze), then I am similarly afflicted, in so far as I see the content, and indeed some of the images, if not the form per se, of my poems in his monochromatic and black and white works on paper included in this book.  How does Clough put it…he sees in the poems and his images ‘an atmosphere replete with flashes of pareidoliac wraiths cavorting!’  But don’t we all see ourselves in a great work of art?  And the greater the work, the more welcoming.

“And there are other related overlaps.  Clough speaks of the classical Chinese style of working, the ink and brush medium.  To utilize paper, ink or watercolor, and brushes is to incorporate into one’s practice, at least, theoretically, wood (fibers, bamboo pulp, for the paper; burned pine wood for the ink), animals (or, at least, animal hair for the brushes – soft goat hair and hard wolf hair), water, soot, stones (these, along with camphor and glue, to help make the ink), other mineral and vegetable elements (for the pigments).  Besides the direct or indirect references in the poems to these painterly ingredients, the title itself of the book, Like Branches to Wind, is evocative of the gesture of a Chinese paint or watercolor brush grazing, interacting, with the surface of the paper.  Not to mention the obvious, that what poetry (writing or calligraphy) and painting or drawing have in common is precisely the brush, at least in the classical ages of Chinese and Japanese art, as well as in many other cultures […]

“What they have in common is the ‘brushing’ gesture in its most open or loosest form (the Chinese identify this technique as i-pin).  While the poems are strict or disciplined in their utilization of certain stylistic conventions, or the contours thereof – in the case of the sonnet form or the four-line stanza in general, in their giving of specific dates and places of composition of each poem –, they remain loose or open, indeed, downright louche, in their willingness to engage the world and its contents indiscriminately and without reservation.  The poetry proceeds from poem to poem, in a linear fashion, as it were, not by themes, even though certain themes, certain tropes, might emerge along the way.  They are organized chronologically, and place is determined by wherever I am at the time, whatever country I find myself in.  There is no such thing as a poem that is inappropriate relative to any given book.  Nor is there any concern about presenting the reader with anything other than the momentary life of a poem.  Narrating that lyrical moment is all that matters to me, much in the same way that the most effective way of handling the brushstroke is quintessential to how Clough renders an image at any given moment, no matter how light or heavy to the touch, no matter how remote or proximate, no matter how literal or abstract.”

In this, Richard Milazzo’s nineteenth book of poetry, A Prayer in a Wolf’s Mouth: Poems of South India, 2013-2014, he travels halfway around the world to South India, to the states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka.  In his first book on India, Where Angels Arch Their Backs and Dogs Pass Through:  Poems 2010-2011, published with Scrisul Românesc in Romania, in 2012, he had traveled through several of the northern and central states of the Indian subcontinent.  But, as in the previous book, he does not do so without visiting other places during the course of the book’s life – in the case of A Prayer in a Wolf’s Mouth, Paris, Vienna, Amsterdam; Modena, Florence, Venice; and, in the States, Jacksonville, St. Louis, Philadelphia, and Santa Monica.  And, of course, interspersed are poems written where he lives and works, New York City.

Before traveling south, the poet lingers in New Delhi for a week, where he laments, in the voice of a young girl:  “Here, I shall meet no one who matters to me, / and I, too, shall fade from memory. // Not the stone nor the low-lying reeds / shall note my passing – / not even the lowly lorry driver, / once so handsome and so youthful!”  During his travels south, the poetry takes for its subjects love, rape, hunger, sewage, unbridled eroticism, martyrdom, the monsoons, democracy, time, fate, death, colonialism, and the ceremonies and rituals that still go to the heart of India, even to this day.  “All of it passing softly in an eye,” he says, “blinded by truth.”  Many of these matters are personified through the figures of the River Yamuna, the Bay of Bengal, the snake stones of Madras, Vishnu’s consorts, and even Gandhi’s loincloth!  Nothing is sacred and yet every detail is scrutinized and cherished.  “We are,” he concludes, “mannequins manipulated by the wind, / gods and goddesses bursting / into the cold flames of a dying mirror, / a prayer in a wolf’s mouth.”

In Paris, his attention turns to Catherine Deneuve, God, Michelangelo’s Drunken Bacchus, de Saussure, and an analysis of the café mechanism of world-watching; in Vienna, the inspirations become Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, St. Francis of Assisi, and Frank, the new Pope; in Amsterdam, Van Gogh and Artaud taunt our perceptions.  In Modena, the bicycle riders and the tram wires overhead precipitate, like Proust’s madeleine, a meditation on time; in Florence, Giotto, Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, Nicodemus, Donatello are coaxed into an architectural erotics.  Post-humanism and the ontological nonfinite; Orcagna, Cellini, Giambologna, and an allegory of corporate violence; Cimabue and the Arno flood of 1966, all seem to coalesce into a dark metaphysical world of Florentine conspiracy and tragedy.  In his uniquely “stray world” of Venice, always on the verge of snow, we stumble across his imaginary friends, Tintoretto, and the Russian writers, Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky, and in reality, the contemporary artist, Lawrence Carroll, in whose besmirched realms of whiteness Ryman and Morandi are implicated.  No matter to what tropical or wintry corner he turns, our poet discloses that “A weightless but ponderous creature we have become / alighting barely upon the laurel branch, / without the semblance, the airy displacement, / of a wingèd species lost to rhyme and meter!”

Amid all of these Indian and European ruminations, we sporadically find ourselves back in the States, in the backwaters of a dwindling world, as it were.  In Jacksonville, Florida, he asks:  “And what is the fragrance of the river to me, / this curtain pulsing, / the Spanish moss weeping in the wind – what are they to me / beyond this moment beating?”  Using again the St. Johns River, rather than the sacred Ganges, he confutes the benighted Language-writing school of his generation, committed seemingly to difficulty for difficulty’s sake:  “What part of this poem should be more difficult / than the fire of the heart / consuming the grasshopper and the owl, / the frog and the egret?”  And with this in mind, like a latter-day fauvist or Kafkaesque metaphysical insect, he would “relanguage the world with songs of pure intent, / this is where I linger among the shadows and wait / for the parts hidden inside your heart to return to me!”  Although we speak of the poor suffering and dying in the streets of Bombay and Calcutta, we conveniently overlook the ‘neighbors’ who die unnoticed in the apartments next to ours in New York City.  Amid reflections of youth and old age, there abides the realization that “the present is something we can never fully realize.”  “We are, after all, merely hysterical residues of flesh darkly spent!”