Chinese Apples

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY FEB 26, 2007

DiPiero's motto might be, "Here I am again trying to say/ what I see." The eighth volume and first selected from this San Francisco based poet and art critic (Brother Fire) shows a scrupulous, if grim, observer and listener, one whose weighty clarities have grown more moving and more profound with time. DiPiero's first books, from the '80s, examined Italian-Americans in working-class environs, Italians in Italy and the long tradition of seasonal lyric throughout the Western world: "moon, stars, soon day breaking,/ the grave dream dreamed elsewhere." In his '90s books, DiPiero's concisely organized sentences grew more complicated, and more rewarding, even as they maintained his bleak wisdom. From these works through Skirts and Slacks (2001) and into 15 new poems, realistic panoramas and still lifes combine an interest in gloom, dirt and grit "the taste of pitch and bus fumes and leaf meal," for example, with a critic's eye for arrangement and composition. Short lines and pithy advice ("tell what you know now/ of dreadful freshness and want") suggest Stanley Kunitz, though other pronouncements convey a basso profundo all their own: "We die, or kill, or let be killed," one poem decides, "then wake to other minor terror,/ to our intensest selves."