Un Amore Veloce
Poems by Hilary Sideris
(Kelsay Books, 2019)
Reviewed by Gerald Wagoner
Hilary Sideris’s new poetry collection, Un Amore Veloce, records the poet’s journey through stages of mature love. The book is organized into four sections, focusing in turn on the end of a first marriage (Real Estate); falling in love again (Un Amore Veloce); living together (Come Non Detto); and entering a second marriage (Anima Mia). Sideris’s poems, in the best lyric tradition, expand on moments of seeming insignificance to reveal a deeper truth. Like the moment itself, her poems are brief. Within their restricted compass, however, Sideris consistently establishes a creative tension between conflict and resolution.
Section I, Real Estate, presents a series of emotionally charged quotidian moments that provide insight into the speaker’s emotional adjustment to her separation and divorce, and to the demands of single parenthood. In the section’s opening poem, “Real Estate,” a list of items in a new apartment quickly escalates into a series of referenda on the speaker’s life and choices.
Your little sister pities you
the hardwood price, lack of light,
fact of working all your life
(does not include hot water, heat).
The speaker’s mother seems to be in denial about her daughter’s new life:
Long-stemmed glasses, dishes, pans,
potpourri your mother sends,
as if you’d married, not left him.
Finally, the speaker confronts the challenge of putting the past in its place, with all the pain and anger that entails:
Stainless steel spoons & forks
in a drawer you have to throw
your weight against to shut.
Particularly powerful is the poem “Custody,” addressed to the speaker’s daughter, in which a “tiger-striped, / tangerine-glazed, tomcat-head” teapot, made by the daughter at ceramics camp, becomes a flash point of raw emotion. Though the daughter was loathe to admit it, it turns out that the teapot was intended for her father’s wife, her stepmother, and not for the speaker, her mother. Presumably in an apostrophe, rather than a truly direct address, the speaker reproaches her daughter, who “uttered the name that beyond / the face of diplomacy remains, / in this household, unrecognized.” Then she begs her daughter’s pardon:
Forgive us. We will not transcend.
Your father will call & we’ll
sputter our toddler lines: I want
that teapot. No, it’s mine.”
It hurts to sunder a marriage, and collateral damage is unavoidable.
In Section II, Un Amore Veloce (in English, “a fast love”—that is, a love moving at a fast pace), the poet’s new language, Italian, becomes the language of love, where words become things, and love seems characterized by a materiality made all the more palpable by the need of both lovers to navigate strange linguistic waters. In the poem “Fluency,” language is barely penetrable, but love makes everything easier. After a series of linguistic fumbles, the speaker recounts, “Gin & tonic deliver us / to that safe, opaque place / where I simply // give him what he / asks: more kiss.”
The first poem of Section III, “Come Non Detto” (in English, “as if not said”), explores, as do the other poems in this section, the tensions of mature love and cohabitation through the little things we do in relation to one another. “I confessed I loved / living alone,” the speaker says, and although she tries to recant, she soon realizes there is “no such / thing as unsaying.” “Common Law,” with its double entendre title, addresses agreeing to disagree; “Venerdi Sera” (in English, “Friday evening”) touches gently on resentments; “Figlio Tuo” (in English, “your son”), exploring the problem of family relationships that predate the current one, ends with an aptly analogous image of the husband’s grown son’s rage:
I watch him fainculo.
A yellow Hummer
runs the light. I cede
my right of way.
The final section continues to examine the complexities of mature love. Foremost on the speaker’s mind in the poem “Marriage” are aging and death: “We take our pills, // the adversary still // a breath away….” The mundane—the world, not the heavens—still reigns in these poems about the tensions inherent in married life. In “Wind,” nominally about the intricacies of long “i” and short “i,” time and change are what’s really at stake, as the wind
…blows
tonight, more than
a breeze, less than
the kind that gives
us chills, a change of
season we can stand.
The early ardor of “more kiss” has cooled, not died, and, “your old Omega’s / gold crown turns” reassures the reader that the relationship in the turning seasons is still precious. The final poem of the book, “Anima Mia” (literally “my soul,” but in effect, more like “my soulmate), sets the balanced tensions in the kitchen. At first, the spouses argue about the proper way to operate the coffee machine; but in the end,
we end up in this kitchen,
where our mothers still
tell us how much the meals
we cook would cost
if we ate out.
As the old saying went where I grew up: lovin don’t last, cookin do. In Un Amore Veloce, while relationships always contain conflict, the successful ones nourish the partners.
Hilary Sideris’s poems live in the ordinary, the daily, and the quotidian. The poet’s concision, and the subtle implications of unerring details, masterfully sustain tension, the movement between conflict and resolution, to reveal the essential. And yet, throughout the book, Sideris resists the lure of an over-the-rainbow conclusion, in which love conquers all. As the book’s penultimate poem, “Animal Channel,” concludes—
Man & sloth must face
adversity, whatever
form it takes, an eagle
circling, a woman
bent over a sink of knives.
Watch out for those knives: like love, they can move at high speeds.
Gerald Wagoner is a former Studio-in-a-School-Artist and New York City elementary and secondary English teacher. Born in Pendleton Oregon, he holds a BA in creative writing from the University of Montana, and a MFA in sculpture from the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY). His artwork has been exhibited at The Drawing Center, The Queens Museum, and PS 1. In 2018, Wagoner received a six-month visiting artist residency at the Brooklyn Navy Yard (sponsored by the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation). During this residency, he wrote a series of poems inspired by the Navy Yard’s history, and by the people who labored there. His poems have appeared in Right Hand Pointing. Wagoner has lived in Brooklyn since 1984.