BODY ENGLISH REVIEWED BY KIRBY CONGDON

Body English by Joseph Verrilli was reviewed by Kirby Congdon for Small Press Review.


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Review:
Body English
Joseph Verrilli
10 1/2 x 14 cm (4 1/2 x 5 1/2") stapled (56)p
illus cover
Cambridge MA 02139: Alternating Current, 2009
PO Box 398058
alt.current@gmail.com
$5. Purchase online at alt-current.com

The first item, "Story," is a verbal translation of an experience that I think most of us have when we become conscious of our own consciousness. We ask ourselves how do we fit into the reality of being alive? This question arises most keenly when someone else close to us dies, and reality splits in two. Joseph Verrilli doesn't bring up any event; nor does he see his sense of who he is as that much of a problem. He only asks in a quiet moment, how did I come to be here, with no passport, no guide book, no map. There was no implication of despair, even though the passage of time was referred to. I took it all as a prose-poem that was, as I say, a verbal translation of a kind of epiphany of self-awareness that did not need to lean on a doctrine, or moral lesson to be convincing. It was a shared confidence that did not need explanation and, so, was successful in communicating what is almost beyond expression.

We can understand Verrilli's wanting to produce his small-press magazine, Drama Garden. It is an extension of his commitment to being involved and to being alive. So, too, in this new collection of poems and prose, Body English, we see the dance of life in which the identity of seven little girls becomes the alter egos for that opening essay, "Story," in suggesting in detail once more the super-real time of memory.

The reader insists on knowing more of the kinship between the girls and the author but even the very last line of this group is

Francoise wasn't even your real name.

Verrilli explains himself as having been devoted to his wife and her own girlhood, but the overall concern is about, as he puts it,

surviving childhood itself.

While I wish Mr. Verrilli had not dispensed with punctuation, I have to admit that his work exemplifies the function of poetry in its purest form as in the phrase from "Adagio,"

The vulnerable
the strived for balance
not always feasible
never clearly stated
promises
sometimes meant to be broken
the lives like dreams like reality.

The phrase does have a specific grammatical reference to growing up, but it is poetry all by itself.

The collection seems to prove that if we listen to what our poems are trying to tell us, we will learn and communicate knowledge that transcends analysis and touches on what we mean by the term universal truth, however individual the source of our experiences may be. I can see why the editor, [l]eah [a]ngstman, wanted to put this collection out. It's very good.

Kirby Congdon
End Of Review
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