Deborah DeNicola’s The Impossible echoes my favorite definition of poetry: “to say in words what is impossible to say in words.” This occasionally whimsical as well as serious treatment of death, love, Alzheimer’s, the afterlife, judgment, and caretaking, romps through a pastiche of Americana from the second half of the twentieth century to the present. It depicts the best of contemporary poetry, as DeNicola flirts with the surreal, presenting an oddly comprehensible marriage of culture, mood, music and visuals. This particular LA Times Book Award winner is uniquely well-earned.
Her frequently ornate, rococo thing-a-ma-bob diction often skids into a very plain style, bumping into a curt phrase or a bit of jargon or cliché. This deft wordsmithery with its elegant syntactical juxtapositions delighted, amused & kept this reader awake, sans anything weepy or egocentric. There is no moment when the persona flirts with the confessional or indulges in melodrama & takes herself poor-me-seriously. No blame. No bile. Thank you, Deborah.
I was particularly concerned about “The World’s Veil,” a section that explores her father’s afterlife. He died from a drug overdose when the author was a teen contemplating the purchase of her prom dress. It was difficult to imagine how this series might be done without invoking either a macabre or maudlin rant. I was wrong. She also manages to pull it off without any New Age diction or woo-woo claptrap. DeNicola successfully lances the body’s geography in the persona of her father while delivering glimpses into a New York doctor’s yacht club life with “fluted glasses & wives in spaghetti straps / dancing to hi-fi fox trots crooned by Como & Crosby” (63). “The weather of his death was not a place,” but with this exploration we get a glimpse into it as “the world continues with its ignorant mirage” (68). The doctor, like Dante, visits fiery pits and works his way through a Kafkaesque landscape seeking relief until he realizes that “he was damned, / not by the mafia he thought was God / but by his own brutal judgement” (78). Kudos!
Her initial poems are a lively invitation. “Feng Shui For Lovers” introduces the reader into a lush, baroque, internal panorama of mischief-making whimsey as she commands the arrangement of a romantic landscape. DeNicola delights in the topography of word play and shares that playground, daring us to keep up. Fortunately, we can because she does the hard work of explicitly saying what she means as well as decorating it. Her second piece is equally strong as she liberally creates her own parts of speech & strews DeNicola verbs and adjectives across the white space of love. “I’ve gluttoned on love, /…its poxy crevices and dessications,… / this deciduous body / and outbacked arteries,…. / Stabilized. Simonized. Decelibatized,… / without withs and without withouts / and God help us without pres and posts, no / syntaxable legalese please—just the surge / of cheekbone and chi, glitter skin, gypsy hips” (18). What fun! Couple that with “he drove much faster than he could think, / like Bond in his Aston Martin”( 22).
Allusions pepper her poetry cohering like a collage, allowing the reader to revisit popular culture: so many Hitchcock & James Bond movies and the eras that spawned them. Odd metaphors like “the mosh pit” and “Chapter Eleven of the heart” startle us both intellectually and emotionally and enliven this feisty book (28). Later, she invokes Bukowski’s “Love is a dog from Hell” (32). She is also adept, at ease, with the classical, describing Penelope’s “husband-hewn bed and futile attempts to sew herself into her own tapestry” (36).
The book’s scope and range are immense. It manages to be topical in “The Evening News”: “another option if you’re ruling out suicide” (99). In “Indulgences,” an engagingly playful but poignant interaction between Georgia O’Keefe and Magritte is concocted as she unravels her parents' destinies, informing us of her father’s death and her current role as her mother’s caretaker.
She pays tribute to Mark Strand in “Aquarian Orpheus”: “we hear poems built of vowels, poems mocking themselves, poems so pleased to be poems, bemused at the range of their pain, consumed at their own toiling, elusive, mewing poems whose feet never touch ground… here in the pin-drop quiet we’re almost splay-legged in rapture” (104).
Her finale “What Falls Away is Elsewhere” is a poem that displays her academic rigor: the range & depth of DeNicola’s expertise extends to writing a poem after Roethke, Stevens and Yeats. If you lack literary stimulation, I recommend you model this poem, accept this challenge. Echo the words and strategies of three masters while creating a short one-page lyric that is also uniquely yours and comprehensible. Good luck. In the meantime, may the universe bequeath us more books by DeNicola.
A three-legged stool, Sally Naylor (poet, therapist & teacher) teaches community workshops for the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, writes memoir, text & workbooks for neophytes & offers Zoom shops for emerging poets. Recent publications include Synapse Flies Into Startle: The Orgasm Book from Poetry Box Press. For more information about her classes see her website WRITER'S CATAPULT .
