Melfi, Mary. Welcome to Hard Times.

Mary Melfi walks a tightrope through Welcome to Hard Times, her eighth collection of poetry and first in over twenty years.To one side is the past: a lifetime of triumph and frustration, love won and lost.On the other, a present any of us might recognize: a stultifying regime of economic unease, emotional disconnection, and general malaise.To suggest Melfi steps lightly between these worlds is, perhaps, inaccurate; rather, she bounds along the tightrope, careening from side to side, only ever one small slip from the abyss.As readers, all we can do is try to keep up.The effect is dizzying, electric, a rousing return to the poetic form by one of our most versatile Italian-Canadian writers.For Melfi, poetry is performance.She has organized her 111 new poems into the phases of a theatrical production, taking us from "Casting Call" to "Curtain Call." Each poem is titled after a play or film from the 1970s or earlier.Readers looking for a well-defined link between a poem's title and its subject matter are out of luck; for the most part, the connection, if any, is tenuous -a link to be forged by readers themselves.It is tempting to read this intertextual web as a commentary on artifice, on the contrived unreality of all artistic endeavour -but that's not the whole story.Melfi sees performance as a profoundly humanistic act, going so far as to thank, in the acknowledgements, everyone in the theatre and film industries who create "stories which entertain, inspire and tell the truth about the human experience." By putting her work in conversation with theatre and film, she invites readers to envision the poem as monologue: a moment of dramatic tension between personal and public spheres.In these poems, Melfi grapples with the diverse themes that have animated her career.We witness class struggle, the trauma of migration, the broken promises of capitalism and multiculturalism.We catch glimpses of -almost intrude upon -the poet's "flesh-eating anxiety" ("Lovers and Lunatics"), her attempts to reconcile multiple identities: artist, worker, wife, then widow; lover, daughter, mother, and more ... and the fallout when those identities collide.Along the way, we are introduced to a cast of characters with enough personality to fill a much longer volume: an overbearing mother, God Himself, the devil, a series of ill-fated lovers (to which we owe the sublime lines, "You are forgotten like water is forgotten / when a woman drowns" in "Love me or Leave Me").As we approach "Opening Night, " a son appears, the star of some of the collection's brightest pieces ("A Lesson in Love, " "The Sun

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.