Candle-Ends: Reviews
Shelley Carpenter

The Italian Professor’s Wife by Ann Pedone

Intimacy is at the heart of Ann Pedone’s compelling poetry collection, The Italian Professor’s Wife (Press 53, 2022), a narrative, lyrical love triangle between three characters occurring during an extended holiday in Italy. Two are married and are named on the cover. The third character remains a mystery. Interestingly, they are nameless, described in third-person pronouns with the exception of one reference throughout the poems. The poems seem timeless, centered around ordinary people—perhaps on a second honeymoon tour—but this changes abruptly when they arrive in Rome. A subtle transformation occurs. One of them wanders and the other is consumed by it.

We must have been very lonely
people to have done this to each other. (27)

One of the nuances of the collection is how it captures the idea of living in multispace dimensions that are tangible as well as temporal. This is seen in public and private spaces of restaurants, train stations, cafes, and hotels. The in-between places that mark a journey as well as invisible breaks in time and action happening off the pages.  I really enjoy this. Wondering what the characters are doing and what they will do next. A reader’s wonder-lust. Likewise, there is an atmospheric tone that soon becomes apparent. There is isolation and longing. A loneliness that borders despair. I am reminded of the twentieth-century New York artist, Edward Hopper. Many of his figurative paintings show couples in such places and spaces, some of which have an added dimension of being observed from the other side of a glass window outside an urban diner, or through sunny windows that contrast the figures. Pedone does this, too, with her vivid prose and structure. The reader is there.

Keeping with this idea, the poems are also juxtaposed to another equally interesting and clinical first-person plural narration titled “The Continuity Script” ordered in Roman numeral numbered “scenes” that read like stage directions in a play, a dramatic element from which the reader sees the subjects from a different vantage point. Complementary. They are read in tangent. One poem is in the point of view of the nameless wife, then what seems to be a different speaker is observing her like an omniscient private detective reading aloud from his little notebook straight out of a noir film or novel.

SCENE IX

We see the wife going down in the elevator

We see the wife sit at a small table in the hotel bar

We see the wife order a glass of wine

We see the wife look down to the end of the bar

The husband is sitting next to a woman

The wife watches them

Light fills all of the openings in the room

The wife can see that the woman is beautiful. (29)

What’s more, Pedone’s thoughtful stanzas often read much like a laundry list. The speaker ticking off her day. No punctuation. Short line breaks. A run-on sentence containing a runaway list of actions and items.

Stripped the bed found
the train tickets tried
calling my sister picked up
his pants from
the bathroom floor reached
into the front left
pocket and while he
wasn’t looking
held my breath and pulled
the lining all
the way out. (4)

Likewise, Pedone is selective in her vocabulary, slowly and seductively showing a marriage in various angles and in unwritten prose. Missing punctuation and white space heighten the tension that is grinding between these characters. Glamorous and provocative.

The diary-style short narratives from the wife’s very intimate point of view adds to this idea. Many begin with routine remembrances leading to something else smoldering beyond surfaces.

Feb. 29th

The maid left a stack of new towels on
Top of the TV

Three Turkish men have been arguing
In the hallway since lunch

While I was brushing my teeth this morning
he came out of the shower and
wrote something
on the bathroom mirror

I left the door unlocked when
we got into bed

And drained all the
milk from between my thighs. (28)

A lot is happening in this small remarkable volume filled with white space, erotica, and innuendo. Small movements and motions. A look, a word—hold couplets of meaning.  Each poem is a chapter in the lives of these two people traveling across Italy though springtime and ending in a railway station in Palermo.

*

Ann Pedone is a poet and literary translator in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the author of The Medea Notebooks (Etruscan Press, Spring 2023), and The Italian Professor’s Wife (Press 53, 2022), as well as the chapbooks: The Bird Happened, perhaps there is a sky we don’t know: a re-imagining of sappho, Everywhere You Put Your Mouth, Sea [break], and DREAM/WORK. Her work has recently appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Narrative, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Louisville Review, Gigantic Sequins, Conduit, and Toasted Cheese.

Shelley Carpenter is TC’s Reviews Editor. Email: reviews[at]toasted-cheese.com