Mary di Michele: Essays on Her Works.

Carol A. Stos is an assistant professor in the Department of Modern
Languages and Literatures at Laurentian University.

Joseph Pivato, editor of this volume in Guernica’s Writers Series, has gathered six essays and a tribute to di Michele, in addition to authoring the introduction and contributing some thought-provoking research notes, a revealing interview with the author, a bibliography, and a brief biography of this “Canadian poet, novelist and teacher, [who] has one of the most distinctive voices in North American writing.” This volume on di Michele illuminates that description and invites further study of her writing.

Thematically, the essays deal with recurring issues in di Michele’s work: (dis)location, place and landscape, silences and voice, language, and questions of identity for women and for the woman writer.

The author’s early poetry is the subject of Lisa Bonato’s study of the multiple perspectives and voices which inform di Michele’s first explorations and assertion of identity. Nathalie Cooke, deconstructing shifting meanings of “integrity,” examines strategies of speech and silence in slightly later poetry. She considers problematic confessional elements in the work and introduces the dichotomy of the visual and the verbal which di Michele artistically attempts to bridge.

In a different take on the visual and the verbal, Jon Paul Fiorentino studies the use of the ampersand in a close reading of “Emergent Luminosity,” analyzing “the ironic negotiation of language, landscape and self.” The verbal and the visual also inform Debra Muchnik’s reading of di Michele’s first novel, Under My Skin, as film noir. In “Refiguring Alterity,” Barbara Godard analyzes the poetic language of later poems, exploring the author’s concerns about perception, metamorphosis, and “the porosity of borders.” Ian Williams, analyzing the latest novel, Tenor of Love (focused on Caruso as told by the significant women in his life), studies another fascinating attempt at artistic bridging: the representation of music with language. Richard Harrison pens a personal tribute to di Michele’s inspirational influence as a poet and writer. The final essay, by Vera Golini, positions di Michele as a recognized Canadian poet who challenges notions of the relevance of women’s and ethnic issues in Canadian literature.

This volume is an important contribution to the recognition and critique of Mary di Michele’s poetry and prose.