'By Art Amid the Accidents of Fate'

The Harvest & the Lamp (Franciscan University Press, 2020), a collection of poems by Andrew Frisardi, arrived on Palm Sunday. Frisardi is an American-born poet who has lived near Orvieto, Italy since 1999. He is a scholar and translator of Dante and has translated Giuseppe Ungaretti and the Milanese dialect poet Franco Loi. What a pleasure it is to discover a good, previously unknown poet, something hasn’t happened since I first read Aaron Poochigian several years ago. 

Frisardi’s poems aren’t puzzles. Neither do they resemble bumper stickers. They often begin conversationally but never bloviate. There’s a relaxed terseness about them. I’ve read only a handful of his poems thus far because I’m delaying gratification. In the collection’s first poem, “The Yellow Moth” (it’s not a nature poem, thank God, though Frisardi pays attention to the natural world), he writes, apropos of spring and the Lenten season:

 

“How does the earth do it, year after year

Becoming young again?”

 

As though to answer the question he writes:

 

“Where I am in the world, it’s Lent, Quaresima.

Grotesques of Carnival that celebrate

Flesh have given way to vigils and ash.

And yet this ancient custom happens right

When spring is set, as if to say rebirth

Is not a given, it’s what we create

By art amid the accidents of fate,

And in our times of dying – call it grace.”

 

In the collection's next poem, “Easter Morning,” Frisardi writes:

 

“From a bush nearby I hear an unknown whistle,

indomitably upbeat: ‘Wake! It’s time!’

The birds are in their skeletal cathedral

and I am in my body that’s not mine.”

 

Poetry this good humbles a reader. We don’t see it very often. Criticism seems beside the point.