Immune to Gravity

Bev Daurio was an editor and poet in Toronto.

Immune to Gravity is Mary di Michele’s fifth book of poetry; it represents a progression rather than a departure from her earlier work, concentrating on family, male/female relations, and the relationship of life to art. The opening poem, “Touch,” which explores human exile from emotion and closeness, without nurturing or tenderness — “How do they do it, the ones who live/ without being touched?”, sets the thematic and rhythmic tone. The book is structured into four sections then into further categories; and every thing, every person, it seems, iseither touched and touching or gray and abandoned. Even ideas are judged on their potential to nurture: “something abstract and mathematical/like the square root of zero.”

Di Michele’s ability to narrate poems in images (“...balloons/ astray in gutters,/ their purpose vague/ as deflated sex organs,” “Mounds of raked leaves/ ... /like dead bodies at the climax/ of Shakespearean tragedy,”) combined with her control of language, makes the poems seamless, without edges. Her best poems (among them “Hunger,” “Gravity,” and “Beauty and Dread in 1959”) are so stunning that they infuse the pages around them.