Panick Love

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
author of Calling Texas.

D’Alfonso has written a long prose poem based on the Odysseus story.
His voyager has run aground temporarily in Paris, which—as in
Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises—is presented as Circe’s Aeaea. The
narrator seems unable to move from the bars and streets of Paris toward
his home; like Odysseus, he finds that his satchel of winds has been
opened. This contemporary voyager has the dilemma of two homelands:
Canada and Italy, a polarity common in Italian-Canadian writing. Perhaps
a further complication: the poem was translated from the author’s
French text, so the allegiances are especially complex. The technique of
the poem shows variety of sentence length, a requirement of the prose
poem genre. The tendency to overwork the rhetorical question is another
mark of the prose poem, along with a portentous air (traceable to
Rimbaud). The work is rather static and the emotions of boredom
(traceable to Baudelaire) and confusion make it slow reading. The final
prayer to Penelope to save the speaker from his “panick love” seems
too easy a conclusion: Odysseus did in fact escape to Aeaea, though he
had only one homeland to seek. This work is a little too static and
rhetorically self-conscious to succeed. Odysseus should simply pack his
bags and go.