HOME AND ABROAD BY DREW SWINGER
Begin with the title of Judith Baumel’s new chapbook of poems, Passeggiate. An Italian term that makes occasional inroads into English, it refers to the custom in Italy of taking leisurely evening strolls in piazzas and along thoroughfares, where family and friends congregate before dinner to see and be seen and to catch up with the latest news and gossip. It is a ritual both public and intimate. For Baumel, who herself has lived in Italy as a Fulbright scholar and resident of the Civita Institute, passeggiate may begin in these literal strolls and encounters with locals and their culture, but they end in more troubled and farther-flung connections.
Her most direct references to this custom are in a series of five eponymously titled poems that punctuate this collection. The breeziest and most appealing of them is “Passeggiata in Enna.” It’s a sly vignette opposing two women. The older of the two, a banker’s wife, is one of the wives returning from their evening strolls as out of habit or duty “To the shops of their men.” The younger has no such obligation. Like the Girl from Ipanema,
She is tall and free with her kisses
And her camisole shifts to show
Fashionable
See-through plastic bra straps.
The detail is prosaic but precise, the free-flowing enjambment skillfully opposed to the more regimented litany of return preceding it: “The wife of the butcher. / The wife of the baker. / The wife of the coffee maker” and so on. The young woman literally doesn’t fall in line. At this point, the poem could simply have turned on the familiar conceit that youth fades. But the old ways the wives doggedly adhere to—shaped over generations by the rituals of Catholicism and the bygone cult of Ceres that the Sicilian town of Enna is renowned for—have their own beauty, we are given to feel, and are alike under threat of extinction:
but we
Will not leave Sicily’s omphalos
Until Ceres is comforted among
The mourners of Pergusa. Until
There is no Madonna of the Visitation
To dress in white for. No one to carry
Our tradition on a golden float.
If these oppositions resolve at all, they resolve in the final figure of the poem, an internal near-rhyme reminiscent of the last line of Baumel’s former teacher Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Bight.” In Bishop’s poem, “All the untidy activity continues, / awful but cheerful.” In Baumel’s, “All the young people have a good / Time and she is gravely lovely.” Doubtless, this echo is a form of homage. Notice how similarly each sentence begins and how the sentiment flips from one rhyme word to the next the way some songs in a minor key end on a Picardy third. It is Baumel carrying “tradition on a golden float.” While it should be clear from this poem that Passeggiate is no mere travelogue, its travel writing does follow some of the conventions. A travelogue, for example, would seem incomplete if there were no reflections on a region’s food and art, and Passeggiate does not disappoint. The prose poem “Spuntinu in Gerace” (which appears here in Consequence) is a savory morsel of the former. Meaning “a bite to eat” or “snack,” the spuntinu in question, a tasting of olive oils, is a lesson not only in the olives’ careful cultivation but in the culture that evolved and assimilated from brutal beginnings to produce such a flavorful condiment. As for the latter, a fine example of the ekphrastic, or art-descriptive, genre is “The Last Judgment in which Enrico Scrovegni is Seen Presenting a Model of His Chapel to the Blessed Mother.” As with “Hic Adelfia Clarissima Femina,” an ekphrastic poem that opens this collection, Baumel’s attention is drawn to the margins of the artwork, where she observes the small, naked bodies risen from the dead at the bottom of Giotto’s fresco:
Like a litter of mice born bare and squirming
the resurrected emerge from the cracked ground,
their bodies so very pale and hairless
so small and scrawny, stunned and scrambling
to comport themselves.
And in particular there’s one resurrected man who “is holding the top of his sarcophagus / like a surfboard.” The description is dead on, as it happens, but that in itself doesn’t matter so much as how the poem pivots after she points him out. It’s rather clever, and it justifies the fussy title: as Giotto painted Scrovegni presenting the same chapel whose walls his fresco adorns, the resurrected man in the fresco seems, with some trepidation, to become aware of the whole three-dimensional interior of the stunningly blue-walled and -ceilinged chapel, “not yet sure if he will set out with [his board] / into the waves on this strange stormy day.” Might not the last judgment, were it ever to come, be as wondrous and disorienting to the saved?
All of the poems mentioned so far have drawn inspiration from Baumel’s travels. But all roads lead home, and home for her is the Bronx. She explores its byways and roots in a variety of tones and forms, but in one mode especially. As if to acknowledge the great wave of Sicilian emigration to the Bronx in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Baumel writes in the pastoral tradition of Theocritus (a Sicilian)’s Idylls and Virgil’s Eclogues, which invoke the Sicilian Muses. “I Too Was Loved By Daphne,” for example, is a gender-reversal of Virgil’s Fifth Eclogue. Masked as Virgilian nymphs but speaking in the world of today, mourners take turns sharing memories of a departed friend, and the last, of “Mornings on the Palisade greenway,” is poignant: “We walked and talked and thought, but it wasn’t true, / that my life was closing down and hers was blazing anew.” Shared loss is a subject Baumel has handled well as a poet, from “To the Parents of a Childhood Friend, a Suicide” in her highly accomplished début, The Weight of Numbers (1988), to its sequel “You Weren’t Crazy and You Weren’t Dead” in Now (1996). And her sense of it colors one of the most ambitious poems in this collection, “After the Battle of Long Island, the Battle of Pell’s Point.” Long after, it turns out, for this poem is a reflection on the 9/11 terrorist attacks as experienced on the periphery, in the vicinity of sites of two Revolutionary battles. It raises questions about our origins as a nation, what we’ve become as our prosperity has grown, and how we might endure. But at its core, it’s two witnesses to the attack, Meliboeus and Tityrus, safe from immediate harm and trying to make sense of it. In Virgil’s First Eclogue, Meliboeus has been dispossessed of his land during a time of civil conflict, and Tityrus is a former slave who, having come into possession of a small plot, offers Meliboeus shelter for the night. In Baumel’s poem, Meliboeus’s home is not lost, but it is no longer the same. He recalls the day of the attack being stopped at a makeshift military checkpoint on his usual route home crossing the Throgs Neck Bridge from Queens and trying to reach Tityrus for information. The invitation Tityrus would have offered is straight-up translation until he mentions the smoke, which in Virgil’s eclogue rises comfortingly from the chimneys of neighboring homes:
I would have said—Friend, stay the troubled night.
I have ripe apples, mealy chestnuts, pressed cheese.
Look left the shadows lengthen out and fall
where smoke rises—powder of computers,
asbestos, concrete, paper, a Parcaean air.
There’s no comfort to be had, not even for the night. And even the narcotic effect on Meliboeus, looking away from the towers, of having seen sailboats of the well-to-do harbored in the Sound is a “bitter fact dissolving under my tongue.” That “Parcaean” air (from Parcae, the Fates of Roman mythology) circulates throughout this collection. It is a sign of age, and maybe wisdom. In her travels and reading, she has seen much. Yet recognizing the strength and polish of her earlier collections, I can’t quite shake the feeling that some of the poems here are not quite in their final state. A hitch in the rhythm here, a mot juste on the tip of her tongue. But this is often because the poems gather in too much of the world rather than too little. And how can one not recommend a poet who finds an historical rhyme between the failure of the Staten Island Peace Conference of 1776 and the terrorist attacks on the same date 225 years later, who hears Wallace Stevens in a stray phrase of W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (“the acme of absurdities”), or for whom the salt in a Sicilian eatery “tasted of sacrifice”? This is a poet who is restlessly tinkering and extending the bounds of her art.Refracting the wisdom of the Bible, Theocritus, Virgil, Milton, W.E. B. Du Bois, Wallace Stevens and Adrienne Rich, among others, these poems confront contemporary social and political experiences.