Keeping My Name

by Catherine Tufariello

Book Overview

2005 Poets' Prize * Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist * Booklist Editors' Choice 2004 "For formalists, this author comes as a gift, a poet fully in charge of her forms, subtle and controlled. She embraces the villanele, Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets, the measured quatrain, rhymed couplets. . . . What excites the reader is watching Tufariello use the limits of these traditions to stretch her creativity." --ForeWord. "In immaculate, subtly...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0896725758
• ISBN13: 9780896725751
• Release Date: April 2006
• Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
• Length: 91 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

a beautiful collection

The Walt McDonald First Book Winner is one of those awards that I watch for. One of my favorite books of poetry (April Lindner's Skin) won it. And now another winner has become one of my favorites. Catherine Tufariello has written a wonderful and beautiful book. It is a collection of formal poetry that shows a mastery of someone that you would have expected to have been writing much longer than she has. The book is divided into five sections. Section one contains seven well written poems. Section two contains several of my favorite poems. "Snow Angel" is a wonderfully written villanelle (which is difficult to do well). "The Mirror" is a sonnet that deals with divorce is such an original way. "Ghost Children," another sonnet, takes on the inability to have children--describing the features of their unconceived children in such beautiful language that you can picture the child and mourn its loss. It's a masterful poem. One of my favorites, "Keeping My Name," takes on the issue of her last name, and it is a mouthful. After all the seriousness we've had, this bit of lightness falls in perfectly here. Section three are translations of Cavalcanti, Guinizelli, and Petrarch. Section four starts with Lorenzo Lotto's Annunciation and then goes into a series of biblical poems, several of which ("No Angel," "Rebekah I," and "Mary Magdalene") are truly some of her best work. It's really a great collection of poetry and after reading it, it has become one of my favorite collections, one I'm recommending to everyone I talk to.

Unforgettable Debut

Catherine Tufariello is a young poet with an ageless sensibility. I marvel at her seemingly effortless technique, her warm sense of humor, and her muted renderings of desire, sorrow, and joy. A contemporary master of the sonnet, the heroic couplet, and rhymed quatrains, Tufariello writes movingly and wittily of heroines ancient and modern, capturing the essence of their experiences in lines that etch themselves in memory. Take, for example, the closing line of "Rebekah (I)," which sums up this childless women's lament: "My life contracted to a cry for water."Or consider Tufariello's sumptuously detailed sonnet "Fruitless": Now oleander flames along the beach/ And tart green sea grapes ripen one by one,/ While inland, warm and heavy in the sun,/ The rosy mangoes dangle out of reach./ Alone these languid afternoons, I teach / Myself the names of trees. We're overrun / With litchi nuts, and then, their season done,/ Pick sapodilla, sweet as any peach. // A mass of tangled green, the lawn's gone wild. / Another friend has had another child, / This one (she'd laughed, embarrassed) a surprise./ Small lizards, lithe in torrid silence, dart/ Beneath beseeching sprays of bleeding heart/ And blue and orange bird-of-paradise.The list of excellent original poems in this debut collection is astonishingly long: "Free Time," "Dana Dancing," "The Walrus at Coney Island," "Epitaph for a Stray," "The Mirror," "The Worst of It," "Pentimento," "No Angel IV," "Rebekah I," "Mary Magdalene," "Keeping My Name," "The Waiting Room," "Ultrasound," "Fruitless," "Useful Advice," "In Glass," "First Contact," "The Dream of Extra Room," "Useful Advice: The Sequel," and "Liana's Song." And then there are the superb translations of Petrarch's sonnets, including "Now you have done your utmost . . . "Oh. Lady, if my life . . ." and "Go grieving rhymes . . ."The publication of this book is a signal event in American literature. Don't miss an opportunity to own the first book by a poet who will never go out of style.

Incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be.

Catherine Tufariello's new collection is a startling first appearance. To borrow (as I do in my title) from the famous letter Emerson wrote Whitman after a first reading of the 1855 Leaves of Grass, here a great career begins, which must have had a long foreground judging by the quality of this initial performance. Indeed, I agree with Richard Wilbur that this is "one of the finest first collections I can remember seeing," and that Ms. Tufariello is "a new poet who plays the whole instrument of poetry," which is to say she has an eloquent voice, a tirelessly observant eye and a musically sensitive ear, and she combines all of them seamlessly with a confident, unforced command over the power inherent in poetic meter and form that is rarely heard today. To witness the dazzling formal mastery and variety of this collection flow, organically and inevitably, through observations so acute and expression so delicate they invoke the finest poets in our tradition, is to become reacquainted with the full power inherent in poetic language through a voice that is nevertheless absolutely of our own moment. From a lovely lyric describing a little girl dancing alone at her older cousin's wedding with unfallen joy and egotism to a heartbreaking elegy for a schoolmate, from a delicate villanelle describing a young woman's struggle with anorexia to a stunning tribute to the leaders of the "White Rose" resistance movement in Hitler's Germany, from surprisingly fresh translations of Petrarch and Guido Cavalcanti to delicate personal histories describing the sadness of a broken first marriage and the redemptive joy of a daughter born late during a second, Ms. Tufariello commands the entire keyboard of her art. This is what I read poetry for, and why I hope the art survives the current age.

A Wonderful New Talent

This book is comprised of an excellent collection of poetry by a young poet of unusual ability. Her talent is eloquently displayed in a New Formalist motif employing both meter and rhyme, although she displays her virtuosity with free verse as well. A number of her poems display a limitless inner emotion and pathos. Yet she is capable of humor and light-heartedness as well. Among the most memorable of her poems is "February 18, 1943," a tribute to Sophie Scholl, a leader of the White Rose student resistance movement in Nazi Germany, who was arrested on the titled date and executed shortly thereafter. Clearly this episode moved the author deeply as she named her own child Sophie in tribute, a revelation appearing in both "Thirty Weeks" and "This Child." That this poet is very adept at revealing her deep inner emotions is also demonstrated in "Elegy for Alice," which memorializes a close friend who suffered a premature death. Ms. Tufariello also tackles lighter subjects with a keen eye for the magic of everyday life as demonstrated by "Dana Dancing," the "Walrus at Coney Island," "Insomnia," and the especially amusing "Crossed Wires" that details the intimacies of an unintended party line in Brooklyn. Yet, it is in her denouement of pathos that she rises to supreme heights. One selection, "Snow Angel," paints a deeply moving protrait of a sister confronting the horror of anorexia nervosa, while others (e.g., "The Mirror," "Ghost Children," "The Worst of It" and "Penimento") bare her own torment in dealing with the reality of a failed marriage. A delightful poem that gives title to this collection (i.e., Keeping My Name") communicates to the reader why, even after two marriages, the author chose to retain her own long but beautifully melodic name. Several of the poems deal with the author's desire to bear children, uncluding "Useful Advice," a moving poem detailing the insensitivity of well-meaning friends who offer advice on surefire means to become pregnant. Also included are several poems dealing with technological means of aiding in this process, one of which was successful (e.g., "In Glass"). For me, one of the most powerful poems in this very strong collection is a pantuom entitled, "Zero at the Bone," referring to a phrase in an Emily Dickinson poem (i.e., "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass") that describes one's fright at encountering a coiled up snake ready to strike. Ms. Tufariello draws an analogy of that viper with a cancer ("What touched its fuse until it sprang, Purposive, lithe, and swift as fire?") biding ts time to unmask itself. Finally, the correct diagnosis is made ("Then finally the sirens rang."). This collection has much more to recommend it, including some beautiful translations of Italian Poetry (e.g., that of Petrarch). It reveals a wonderful new talent and is to be strongly recommended.