The Honeymoon Wilderness

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

Pier Giorgio Di Cicco disappeared from the Toronto poetry scene into a
monastery in 1986. The Honeymoon Wilderness is his first collection of
new poetry since then. He says some of them are prayers, and it’s
clear that all of them are written under the sign of the Trinity
(although only Jesus and God are named). As “your poet with a
vengeance for God,” he rants, cries out for life and against death and
prays for some enlightenment, all in the highly Romantic lyric manner
readers may remember from his earlier books.

He argues that “i am many personifications, without the lesson /
learned,” and this comic humility is best felt in the lengthy sequence
“Marrying God.” There, despite his recognition that “all words
boil down to basics: / love me, forgive me, / need me, thank you.
everything else / is a warming up,” he turns to “warming up with a
vengeance”: there’s a largesse of linguistic play, a high rhetoric
of theological speculation in which he seems to see God everywhere, in
the massive paradoxes that make poetry possible. Nevertheless, “this
frenzied poem” is the best thing in the book.

Many of the later poems have their moments, but the lyric “I” is
too pervasive, lacking the irony that might undermine the felt egoism.
Di Cicco can construct brilliant lines and verses, then drop into the
most conventional banalities in the same poem. There’s no doubt that
the complex faith these poems argue is sincere, and though the poems are
just too noisy to achieve any sense of true meditation, the best of them
feel like real prayers. For people seeking such poetry, The Honeymoon
Wilderness will prove an interesting, even challenging, volume.