An Earring Depending from the Moon:  Poems 2006
by Richard Milazzo.

First edition paperback:  May 2008.
Designed by Richard Milazzo.
80 pages, gatefold covers reproducing in color drawings by Lawrence Carroll, with a black and white photograph of the author by Joy L. Glass, Venice, November 2006, on the frontispiece.
9.25 x 6.5 in., printed, sewn and bound in Turin, Italy.
ISBN-13:  978-0-9793507-1-9.
ISBN-10:  0-9793507-1-9.
Published by Sotoportego Editore, Dorsoduro and Giudecca, Venice, Italy:  2009.

RETAIL PRICE: $30.00 (includes postage and handling)

In this, the peripatetic author’s most recent book of poetry, An Earring Depending from the Moon:  Poems 2006, Richard Milazzo writes more darkly than usual about a world that seems to be dangling over a precipice.  Whether he is in New York, North Florida, London, Venice or Vienna, the storm clouds of the human condition in today’s society overtake his vision.

In the North Florida poems, desire and oblivion are objectified through the landscape.  The fragrant world of honeysuckle and jasmine, and W.C. Williams’ little red wheelbarrow, upon which “so much depend[ed],” are diverted by the darker realities of divorce, missing children and aging.  ‘Ring Around the Rosey’ and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ are reprised in a more ironic context that takes on Biblical overtones, as Revelations, in this author’s view, no longer gainsays reality.  Evocations of Shakespeare’s sonnets and Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” are brought to bear upon the specter of human existence in its most despicable and primal manifestations.  “If it becomes given that story is not incompatible with the lyrical intensity of the sonnet or any other so-called non-narrative form, then wanting, as I do, with each poem, to tell a story, I should not have to sacrifice the orgasmic (or Dionysiac) intensity of the lyric.”  We are, here, the poet argues, in “the land of last things, which we must always take as a possibility and reconvene as possibilities.”

At the center of this book of poems, An Earring Depending from the Moon, is the ultimately inapprehensible world of Venice in winter, a dark and elusive place that hardly exists beyond the romance of stone and the imagination running wild.  “All stories interest me. Poems should have beginnings, middles and ends.  At least mine ought to if they are not to fall back into the Modernist or ‘forward’ into the Postmodernist precipice.