Already Long Ago by David Giannini
Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp

Already Long Ago by David Giannini
Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp

“Already Long Ago”
Poetry
Dos Madres Press, 2023
$21.00, 108 pages
ISBN: 978-1953252791

The setting for David Giannini’s poetry is nature, the countryside. In this and so much else his work is reminiscent of the Chinese poets. Indeed, Giannini concludes the poem, “On My Birthday,” a meditation on mortality written in the haibun style, combining prose anecdote with verse, in which he confesses that sometimes “I have an inky sense of going on forever, as if by some imagined calligraphic brush-stroke there’s a key to never dying”:

As heavy rain
makes brooks
pick up steam
I think of Li Po
sending his poems
downstream, one
by one by one,
until brushstrokes
sink and dissolve. 

Nature and wildlife are ubiquitous in his verse. In “Scaring It Off” Giannini allusively describes warning off a bear with a rifle shot. “Three Openings, a Brief Meditation with Peonies,” a poem about waking and sleep (consciousness is central to Giannini’s thought), describes how “For the peonies’ / eyelids to open ants lick / the sticky petals.”  “Being Here, Being There” likewise measures men against nature. He announces at the beginning:

You are no wiser
standing on this boulder
than standing on that ground.

Later in the poem he drives the point home:  “Mouths of insects come / at flat-out speed / and alert you to yourself.”

Satori!

“I Saw a Man Go Off” is another in the haibun style, a meditation on a man and his bull. The man annoys the bull who in turn gores and tramples the man. Giannini writes: “When I woke, I did not know if I had been man or bull or both.” How like Lao Tze wondering if, after he’d fallen asleep and dreamed, he was a butterfly, he wakes up wondering if he is really a butterfly dreaming, he is human.

As with the ancient Greeks, nature, and myth blend in Giannini’s poetry. “Notes on Drought” alludes to Lethe, the mythical river of forgetfulness in Hades (the word literally means “oblivion”). Daphne, “still turning into a laurel tree,” appears in “A Sense of Eternity in Winter.” Giannini even channels Coleridge in “Riffing on Xanadu.”

Part II of the five-part collection, “Eight Winter Poems,” likewise takes the natural world for its inspiration. “On the Fly” comes with an epigraph attributed to Anonymous: All poets are birds. He compares the poet to the cardinal, “a flame on fresh snow, // scribing his own fresh tracks.” In channeling nature, as in “On My Birthday,” Giannini takes the long view of life and death in his meditations. The very titles, “Happy New Year, Notes on Life After Death” and “A Sense of Eternity in Winter,” clue the reader where his thoughts are drifting. “Hospital Window” features a man in a hospital bed gazing out the window. Giannini muses “what do I know / of weather on its high horse” and thinks of that bedridden man haggling with his surgeon “over body terrain,

then cinching some deal
with death-the-realtor
who changes his mind (a lot).

It’s clear that Giannini, who, like the legendary Chinese poets, writes aphoristically in wise riddles like Zen koans, has a subtle sense of humor, even when considering final things. Indeed, his wordplay makes the reader smile, chuckle. “Give me liberty or give me meth, said the future as I ran into its crosshairs, almost out of breath,” he writes in “Surfaces of Childhood, and 1950s TV,” one of the eleven meditations in Section IV, “Bildungsroman: 11 Preliminary Sketches.” “Bildungsroman,” of course, is the German word for a coming-of-age novel.  In these sketches he traces the development of his consciousness from the time when “caution” was “not yet second nature” up through his “Family Tree” when consciousness of time is all-encompassing.

Giannini cleverly coins the word “squintessential” in one of the winter poems, “Neighbors” to show us people blinded by the glare of ice. In “Beyond the Roof,” from Section V, he writes, “Tell all the roof but tell it slant,” playing on Emily Dickinson’s famous maxim. In the ninth Bildungsroman poem, “After School, Reading Descartes,” he similarly quips, “Not meaning / to put Descartes before the horse….” The reader almost groans while acknowledging the crafty pun.

Likewise, the title of the poem “First Love” from the Section V, sets us up for a discussion of, well, first love, right? But it begins:

To first love the poem because it is.

To first love the poem because it is
as skipping rope is to a child with no need to ask

What does this mean?

And this brings us to an important theme. In “John,” another poem from Section 5, he echoes: “people may wonder about this master’s past surrealist poetry and collages and what they mean. ‘Mean?’ Remember skipping rope, sometimes to music, or just looking at a tree? No kid ever asked, what does this mean?” Like nature, poetry just is. (Or, like nature, poetry just is.) As MacLeish famously wrote, “A poem shouldn’t mean but be.”

For me, “Meditation with a Rant” sums up Giannini’s approach most succinctly. He writes:

Not everything invites us
into wonder.

Wonder invites everything.

Later in the same poem, again returning to the countryside, to nature, he observes:

Here among the hills, air is always growing 
younger, while the forests age.

It’s “the world he could see reflected  // already long ago.” (“A Sense of Eternity in Winter”). You want “meaning”? Or do you want poetry? Read Already Long Ago.