Rocket fantastic poems5/13/2023 ![]() ![]() The characters include The Dowager, The Major General, members of a Court, and The Bandleader, a central figure whose confluence of genders is represented with a symbolic pronoun,, pronounced with an audible intake of breath. The book’s personalities don’t appear in the first person instead, they’re illuminated and interpreted by a central speaker, as if Dante or Alice read tarot. No stranger to the persona poem, Calvocoressi’s previous books include long sequences voicing, for example, witnesses of a horrific circus fire or Amelia Earhart’s awed onlookers. How do we find pleasure-and accept it-in a world where grief is a certainty? And if we can’t, what might we lose? I found myself thinking of pleasure, peril, and the gathering of a motley crew while reading Rocket Fantastic, the third book of poems by Gabrielle Calvocoressi. In the face of uncertainty, the company chooses delight. Over a fortnight, despite unspeakable danger only miles away, they tell each other salacious, hilarious, and passionate stories. They must have been anxious, too-they were running from the plague. Five hundred years earlier, the characters in Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron fled to the exact site of Landor’s poem, Fiesole, an area in northern Florence. The poem, titled “Fiesolan Idyll,” has arrived at a key moment: idyll meets anxiety. Of her own self fresh, full, the most mature ![]() I dar’d not touch it for it seem’d a part In a poem by Walter Savage Landor, a flower provokes alarm: ![]()
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