This Brevity

By Gianmarc Manzione

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• Format: Paperback
• ISBN: 0973996005
• ISBN13: 9780973996005
• Release Date: May 2006
• Publisher: Parsifal Press
• Length: 84 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A poet you should know about

I love these poems! Manzione is a thoughtful poet, wise beyond his years. The collection's title, This Brevity, refers to one of the poems and to one of the book's primary themes. This book is about the impermanence of pleasure, finding beauty in unexpected places, loving life for what it is, and the absurdity of trying to control and order it. I found an ironic parallel running through most of the poems: finding a glimpse of beauty, truth, or happiness in one's final moments, and finding a glimpse of one's end at moments of beauty, truth, happiness, and especially pleasure. I give the book five stars even though I usually reserve the five for the Wallace Stevens and Adrienne Richs of the world. Manzione's writing is certainly well crafted, intelligent, and beautiful enough to be among those ranks, if not now, then one day. I look forward to reading more from him.

Watch this poet!

These are smart and gritty poems lived on the street, in the moments between. They are also at times incredibly sensual: "there is a place/in the unlit bedroom,/there by the closed and curtained window,/where we'll take each other/into the dark." Each poem offers a glimpse into the unlit bedroom where connection and loss--even in passing, in this brevity--are made real. Mr. Manzione seems to be asking us to know the things behind the things and see, as he does, the "trees breaking/free of their bodies in the reassembling dark." Pay attention. This is the work of an important poet at the beginning of a long career.

Words can pierce the heart

This young poet exhibits an amazing ability to use his love and vast knowledge of words to paint portraits of people grappling with both their past and that ultimate end we all face. He is a keen observer of the world around him and translates his vision into meaninfgul and beautiful poetry. In "An Unordinary Conciliation" Gianmarc says all in his lines, "...away from his wife for a week, and that, surely, was a fortune in itself". In those few words he illuminates the man's desire to perhaps be a dolphin, ...accountable for nothing...not knowing that it will die." I feel that Gianmarc is a young man circling the core of his being. I look forward to more volumes of poetry from him to learn what finds there.