Candle-Ends: Reviews
Garrett Ray Harriman
Sneezing Coyotes by Salvatore Marici
Reading the poems in Salvatore Marici’s bountiful new collection, Sneezing Coyotes (Ice Cube Press, 2022), means signing up to become a privileged tourist of moments, each one intimate, systemic, and wide-ranging. Page after page, I felt like I was weeks deep into a heady safari of the scenes and locales (interior and exterior) of one man’s vast, inimitable memory. But counter to the stereotype of the slovenly tourist present only for the thrills and highlights, I felt inclusive to these retellings, embraced by their density and detail. I still feel vindicated, and wiser, and optimistic of my own memories and systems of notice weeks after first reading them.
The greatest gift of these gathered works is just that: renewing faith in the processes and powers of noticing.
In Marici’s poetics, nothing is “merely” anything. Everything is brimming or in motion with the many systems composing it, leaning into it, intruding upon it, remembering it. If this sounds dry or schematic, it is anything but. If this sounds overwhelming, too complex to be intimate, or even preachy, think twice. His poems create sudden, intricate webs of cause and effect, of witnessing and remembering, that generate tableaus snatched out of time.
Take for instance a sequence of three poems, “Gringo Meets Guatemala’s,” that detail the homes and fauna of the country. The second in this series flexes the author’s horizon-wide point of view:
Every morning wives swing brooms
smack pigs’ black butts
chase them out of adobe houses
into Guatemala’s rural roads.
Red dust ankle deep.
Slick when wet.
Triangles made from scrap wood
clasp pigs’ necks. Stops snouts
from rooting fields. Front legs bump
bottom slabs, nudge them into a two-step.
Dusk, they dance over their thresholds. (32)
As varied as Marici’s subjects are, there is an equal number of unique destinations, physical and emotional, that vivify these poems with Sherlockian detail. Chicago, Cambodia, Germany, Florida, Guatemala—each new vista feels like its own world, its own condensed encyclopedia of a single person’s experience. There are often multiple shifts in location in a single three-stanza poem, as well. It’s a whirlwind sensation, these frequent shifts in geography, and constantly rewarding.
“Changed Landscape,” for instance, speaks to Marici’s spellbinding knack for rendering all places personal, history-filled, and majestic:
Rain falls
through cracks in a roof
of a barn built in early 1900’s.
Melted snow seeps,
into gray-splintered boards
once painted red
when horses, cows, and pigs
lived on an 80-acre farm
the farmer’s great grandkids sold. (61)
The occasions that connect these far-flung places range from the intimate to the morose, funerals to jungles, the work-a-day to the philosophic. Moments of activism and introspection are as common as moments of deft and lingering observation, whether countries away or in the author’s backyard garden. In every example, the place itself is described with pinpoint verisimilitude, and the processes described within them become almost tangible souvenirs. That layered, globe-spanning curation extends across the whole collection, while the abundant terrariums gathered along the way become your trusted guides.
Once at our destination, these poems ask us to care long enough to understand the processes at play in life—personal, ecological, emotional—and to think through how our actions and reflections can contribute to, or in some cases corrupt, these living landscapes. They teach and iterate on the truth that presence (no crowds required, just one or two of us proves plenty) allows our lens of witnessing to expand. We see the ecological twists of fate. We experience the customs and lives unfolding in ignorance of and response to our meddling. Nothing is hidden or spared from our inspection.
The compact composition of these memories and scenes do not feel superficial or disrespectful in their brevity, either. They are robust enough to read as true, but controlled enough in their exposure of their subjects to not be exploitative. This interplay of themes is parenthetical, repetitious and resonant; there is no waste—not a feeling, not a shoestring, not a thought. His is a brand of respectful recollection.
In “Facets of Cambodia’s Rats,” the lives and uses of this creature perfectly capture Marici’s eye for description, and even wider eye for macrocosmic implication:
Through the rural regions
brown rats bred in Tanzania
wear harnesses hooked to overhead cables
guide their two feet plus bodies
through fields landmines remain.
Twitching noses scent TNT.
Their 2.6 lbs. do not detonate. (20)
These bewitching players and outcomes are presented with calm and unromanticized clarity. They are not mugging for the poet’s memory, nor are they precious, nostalgia-buffed caricatures. I believe they are here, now, just as they were then. The author does not speak out of turn in these moments. No feelings of misgiving appear, suggesting that Marici is rendering before us anything less than the un-punched-up memory of who and what there was, what they were doing, what was felt. They do not mistake pithiness for deep knowledge, and peddle no such attitude. He doesn’t intimate; he reports.
An ironical eye is never cast upon the inequities broadcast from these storied scenes and feelings, either, just as no gavel of action falls to castigate the reader into submission of the hefty lives, systems, and lessons to be examined. Instead, these poems argue by virtue of presence that observation and memory are systems to be known and explored, and can affect change in themselves. Powerful systems. Unignorable ones. Take them lightly at any point in time, and you risk causing damage.
Stylistically, Marici’s punchy verbs and article-dropped lines cast a savory spell of immediacy and validity to the quick-to-change proceedings, as if events are happening now and the grammar need not apply. His sequences and stanzas almost always include lists of details—physical descriptions, renderings of environment—yet nothing feels static or preserved in his work. This stanza from “An Afternoon in Sticky Hanoi” proves the rule:
At an intersection, a man sits on a curb,
eyes closed; thumbs touch middle fingers.
Centimeters from his sandaled toes
scooter tires roll. Pedestrians’ legs
brush the meditating man’s knees
another sense from streets he knows
passes through his flowing mind,
exits into the universe. (21)
The light of Marici’s memory is sharp in its focus, but soft at its edges. These aren’t dead butterflies pinned to a corkboard, dusty relics of once beautiful or heartbreaking scenes exhumed from the poet’s closet for the sake of a page count. Every scene is a breathing, beating specimen both lightly and starkly depicted. They appear as unchanged things the reader is privileged to witness flutter by, including the gentle chaos their wingbeats leave in their wake.
A procedural grace unfolds over the majority of these poems. His listings evoke a meditative pulse, a ritual of “happening-upon-to-contemplation” for these pieces taken individually and as a final volume. We discover that the limitations and effects of one lifestyle beget or amend the lives, losses, and memories of others—always. “Tales from a Non-Savior” and “Caskets in Demand” showcase this interplay via an international exploration, while “Goodbye to an Unfilled Want” and “Look For a Sign, Any Sign” remind us that the intimate processes of loving and grieving are shared species-wide, regardless of our current address.
Another poetic knife honed to cunning usage is Marici’s theming. If the last stanza of a poem has a message or commentary, it never screams and gesticulates its presence: it wafts, becoming a lingering atmosphere of the steps and details just consumed. So many of these pieces fade and float into their endings, rather than conclude with some definitive image or metaphor or emotion. Yet the formula does not become stale or self-parodying. His images show the skin and scars they need to, their limitations apparent, as our own understanding and connections must be. The outcomes are imperfect, unfinished, but nothing is abandoned. I savored that feeling of examined inhalation each time these devices came to play.
Why? Because that is what being both observer and observed means. His subjects remain undefined but exhaustively explored in the instant. Things are stark and remarked, tenderly and all-encompassingly described, and then handed off to our care from what feels like a pair or warm, steady hands. We’re asked to take notice of the system we have been dropped inside of, not condemned to fix the machine or to burden the responsibility. These lines from “Selective Killings Before Winter” hold up this humbling mirror perfectly:
The rolling mower lays mats of
chopped plants. Green pigments
stain my sneakers. I hold a hatchet
before the autumn’s leafless trees,
most a few years older than saplings.
…
After winter,
no new twigs sprout
on these posts where
song birds peck burrowing insects
fly into bare crowns
sing above
networks of living systems
grown from the dead in soil. (58)
In Sneezing Coyotes, moments and the systems that create them exist in the same breath, and the memories they create are never witnessed, or remembered, alone. I hadn’t come across Marici’s poetry before tackling this review, but the breadth and generosity of his experiences, his inventive, inventorial style, and the evanescent ecological messaging of his work have left a hopeful impression on this new and eager fan. I can’t wait for his next tour to begin.
*
Salvatore Marici’s latest collection of poetry is Sneezing Coyotes (Ice Cube Press, 2022). He also has one chapbook and two other full poetry collections. He was the 2010 Midwest Writing Center Poet in Resident, has judged poetry contests, placed in poetry contests, teaches and attends workshops that teach the craft of poetry. His poetry has appeared in Toasted Cheese, Spillway, Prairie Gold: An Anthology of the American Heartland, Of Burgers & Barrooms, a Main Street Rag anthology, Poetry Quarterly and many more. Marici served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Guatemala as a natural resources specialist and he is a civil servant retiree/agronomist. In SouthWest Florida he is learning to maneuver a 17-foot kayak. During the summer he grows garlic in Western IL. Keep up with his events on Facebook.
Garrett Ray Harriman is a writer and poet living in southwest Colorado. His work has appeared in Atlas Poetica, Toasted Cheese, Kestrel, and other publications. His poem, “Snake in the Grass,” was a semi-finalist in Naugatuck River Review’s 11th Narrative Poetry Contest guest judged by poet Lauren K. Alleyne. Twitter: @Inadversent
