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De Chirico's threads

This collection encompasses further “response poems” and broadens the field to include the Surrealist painter, De Chirico, the protagonist of the verse-play which gives the book its title. A series of sonnets, rhymed and metrical but not strictly formal, revises various Petrarchan figures, such as “ice” and “fire” as erotic metaphor, seeking to recover their intensity in terms of contemporary experience. The series, which includes a translation of Petrarch’s “Una Candida Cerva” (Rime 190), draws at times on readings of the Canzoniere. However, the sonnets are mainly dramatic monologues, and all the speakers are female. One, for instance, is the wife of a soldier serving in Afghanistan, meditating on the effect of warfare on “the pearls and rubies of a young man’s summer.”

Other writers important to the collection include Primo Levi, Jean Rhys, Hölderlin and Ovid. In “2084,” for example, the use of the “Phaeton” narrative from Ovid’s Metamorphoses dramatises a future generation’s encounter with the results of current global warming. In the poems of personal experience some mimetic formal experiments are achieved. For instance, in “Diphthongs,” a poem about childbirth, the line itself is splayed and the syntactic structure is subjected to disruption. The concluding verse-play, “De Chirico’s Threads,” reflects research into Surrealism, and uses biographical material about the artist (Giorgio de Chirico, 1888- 1977) viewed from historical, aesthetic and psychoanalytical perspectives. The use of the canzone in two of the longer speeches forms a connection to the Petrarchan material featured at the beginning of the collection. Learning to combine poetic emphases and informal dialogue was an interesting formal adventure. The play raises an important question, which may be considered particularly pertinent to women artists and scholars, as to how the creative impulse may be sustained without compromise over an extended career.