Stones Are the First to Rise by David Giannini
Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp

Poetry
Dos Madres Press, 2025
$21.00, 122 pages
ISBN: 978-1962847162

In the final poem of Stones Are the First to Rise, “Thinking Back Down Inside Me,” David Giannini reflects:

Too many rectangles took over: ideas and ‘facts’
settled in textbooks forced under my eyes like dyed ice-blocks—

‘the drying and freezing process which goes by the name
of education.’ The gaslighting. The taunts.

A green circle found to betray time by living outside of it
is what I wanted, without knowing why. Poetry sighed.

Learning how to grasp something whole
without enumerating its parts: intuition. It has no time.

Coming to grips with the nature of paradox,
I have as many contradictions as the next man.

So Whitmanesque! In so many ancient myths the life of a person is depicted as an exile, a separation from the original whole from which it is separated. Giannini contains multitudes. The final of the seven sections, from which this poem comes, deals with the beginning of existence. Everything else follows. The first poem in the section is called “Coming to, an Assay,” which starts:

We wake. We come to
our first words gently,
ma-ma  glows in the mother’s ear.

Still inside her we felt no god
but the uncaused original Whole
with its need to project itself myriad

The other poems in this 12-poem sequence likewise address primal relationships, boyhood, the dreams of youth, this yearning for completeness. It’s telling that Giannini ends the collection at the beginning, as it were. It’s like a re-set, getting back to the Whole.

Much of the collection concerns itself with the precarious natural world – which likewise could use a re-set. Giannini is alarmed by the Anthropocene, the current geological epoch in which human activity has had an impact on the climate and ecosystems. As he writes in “Love Poem in a Restaurant”:

What does ‘harmlessly’ mean
when all affects all? O Universe
your scientists toy and test
with experiments until our hearts
are conceptually reduced
to annihilating bits…

It’s a poem that reflects on the particle accelerators in Switzerland, while sharing a meal in a Chinese restaurant with a friend (yes, there is implicit humor!). The very title of this thoughtful collection clues us in to his concerns. It’s the title of the second poem in the book, which comes with an epigraph from a West Coast tribal leader, Katsumahtauta: The stones talk to each other, just as we do. The whole planet is alive, interconnected. Indeed, the image of stone, carrying its metaphorical weight, recurs throughout the collection.

David Gannini’s principle theme in this collection is the creative process, its muses and mysteries, both in art and in nature. Creation and its twin, destruction, take the stage. His thinking tends toward the metaphysical, the mystical. Titles like “Buddha Gave Us,” “Extended Koan,” “Wry Zen Outcome,” and even “Meditation & Whiskey” indicate the mystical depth of Giannini’s perspective. “Indian Man with Angina” opens with a reference to the Katha Upanishad, a sacred Hindu text.

The section that begins with a poem called “The Endling” – the last known individual of a species, whose death means the extinction if the species – includes the recurring image of stone (“Most of the dinosaurs: stone,” Giannini mourns in the poem.)

In “Gratitude,” from the same section, he laments, “Who doesn’t find poetry never truly overcomes despair.” The long, multipart “Failure Suite” that dominates this section opens with a wry epigraph from Mark Twain:

Suppose you were an idiot
and suppose you were a member of Congress;
but I repeat myself.

Its subject is the tragedy of war, Gaza and Ukraine. Giannini writes:

Here is the heart
of a Palestinian

Here is the heart
of an Israeli

What is it these
hearts teach us

if not you can’t
tell them apart.

It might be a little misleading (or not) to call David Giannini a “nature poet,” but his work is full of images of the natural world, reflecting an immersion in it, monarch butterflies, juncos, wolves, Black-eyed Susans, humpback whales, bees. “Ground Elder (Bishop’s Weed)” takes the invasive plant as a metaphor for the cycle of life. But as he ends the poem “Thatfield,” a poem about farmers baling hay (“giant marshmallows of hay”):

Nature, after all, has a vicious aspect:
eat another or die.

Giannini also writes poignant portraits. “The Painter” is about an artist who leaps to her death from the skyscraper in which she lives. Two poems titled “Old Neighbor” paint pictures of a mail order bride and of a reclusive old woman. In both “The painter” and the second “Old Neighbor” poem, Giannini alludes to Emily Dickinson, as the archetype of the reclusive artist. The “Old Neighbor”?

she’s ready

to turn

hangdog through stagger
through woe

until her shadow

sits up
and begs.

The section titled “Wellfleet Journal, Cape Cod” is a suite of ten poems that take place at the ocean, including “Sea Bay Restaurant,” “Watermeal” (“the world’s smallest flower”), “Notes on the Way to the Beach,” “Women Surfing,” “Partially Remembered Seaside Nightmare,” and ending on an image of dolphins leaping in the waves, in “Night Storm at Home After Dolphins-and-Whale-Watching at Sea.”

David Giannini’s poetry resonates with emotion and deep insight into the nature of existence. Stones Are the First to Rise is a meditation on life and the essential longing that motivates us. As he writes in “Intimations of Radiance, an Assay”:

The arrival again
of my desire
to understand
heartbreak built in-
to human existence.