An element of Frank Paino’s poetry that I love the most is that it is absolutely present and interactive. In his other books and especially in this new collection, Dark Octaves, the poetry interacts with the world, interacts with other art, literature, music, and places us so firmly and acutely in the presence of the poet’s beholding that we too open in awareness in ways that are deeply sublime.
Dark Octaves is a collection of work documenting impressions and reactions to kaleidoscopic information drawn from a direct, creative engagement with the world. Early poems, like the opening, “Muse,” take us up close in a meditation on Laura Christensen’s mixed media piece; “Madonna of Mariupol, Ukraine,” is a slow, aching examination of a “photograph of an unnamed pregnant Ukrainian woman being carried from a maternity hospital bombed by Russian invaders,14 March 2022,” with concluding lines that display the very exquisite way Paino’s poetry directly engages the world with an unflinching gaze but always asking the right questions:
O god I no longer believe
in, tell me, how is it
you declared this cold
banishment without need
of our petition?
Indeed, as much as the previous passage starkly frames an atheistic and cosmological world view, Paino’s work is still in dialogue with the mystery behind religious beliefs. An implied, ongoing question of theodicy seems to ride shotgun to many of the poems. Take for example, “Nocturne for an Unidentified Girl Found Murdered in a Field,” with the lines:
Where the summer field
became a shroud
a dirge dragged through coreopsis
while the world turned on its cold axis.
Note also the same concerns rising in the poem, “For the Dive at the End of This World”:
only an ashen
bird who finds no asylum
where the world arcs
at its horizon,
her feathers aflame
in this late and failing light.
While the image reflects the Biblical story of the dove coming to the Ark with a sign of land, an end to the world-destroying deluge, a new covenant between god and humankind—
here, in contrast, there is no olive branch. In fact, the watery death of flood is replaced by the image of fire, the birds feathers “aflame,” an image that at once implies another, different global disaster in the form of climate change while offering a hint of the phoenix rising, a paradox of juxtaposition, a beautiful, ambiguous engagement with the “problem” of the world seemingly being destroyed by our own actions, with the image still in dialogue with a silent god and the imagery, the language of the poetry putting a wedge into the simple version of theodicy, replacing it with a closing that is anything but simple.
Other poems swoop into the spaces between direct almost phenomenological observation and a kind of spying into the mystery, as in the lines from “Altitude”:
One will fall but live to tell the tale
of strange ecstasy
as the barometer’s needle dipped—
that secret kept by jealous gods who,
having lost the gift of fire,
begrudged the bliss of air.
And again, in the concluding lines of “For a Couple Who Dide Two Days Apart” we see a similar disappearing of the tangible, the “real” as though something shed in order for something divine to appear:
these lovers wedded beneath
hoarfrost and hunger, their contented erasure
like staves of music that molder on a forgotten page
until their vanishing itself becomes the song.
While the image may be stark, the reality: the couple dead and buried, the language nevertheless offers an opening, a door creatively designed to provide what the failed god of reality seems to have missed. And so the couple, dead, in the magic and the mystery of the language, become a form of sacred music. In a way, where God of the Bible falls away, a holiness of spirit in the form of art arises.
So what we see as we travel with these poems is the beauty of the language in a turn of phrase creating something more than a lovely image but an alchemy of Paino’s voice-mind at work engaging, contemplating, presenting for us a parade of versions and visions that try and catch a glimpse of the deeper abiding truth, that offers a kind of balm or solace even as the poetry removes from a stance of faith.
Sometimes, indeed, the poems evoke the liberatory poetry of the Transcendentalist poets, displaying a similar spiritual presentations in the cathedrals of nature. Take, for example, the poem “Upon Being Buried with My Twin,”
like sand in the throat
of an hourglass as we await
our measured resurrection
through roots of beech,
through bole and branch
into leaf, into summer’s chartreuse
Dead and buried, and yet even here in a more or less biological even scientific transaction of flesh decay converts into blossom, and in this way the poetry belies a flat atheism in favor of a more subtle “resurrection.”
So while the employment of biblical imagery in Paino’s work is in fact never just a literary tool, nevertheless, the problem of evil, its location, and the methods for addressing if not eradicating it becomes a most human cauldron of consideration. In “Emmett Till’s Casket,” while again there is no balm of afterlife, no explanation for the horror of suffering, in the most tender and tragic of phrasing, we receive direction for examination of evil in the image of the mother of Emmett Till and her unflinching gaze:
lifted him, regardless,
in her refusal to turn—or let us turn—
from his terrible transfiguration.
In this act, political, social, asking all of us not to turn away from the suffering in the world and specifically the suffering caused by human beings, we find not just a moment of implication, (for where has this evil action come from?) but also a quietly beautiful, one might even say, a holy moment in this lifting. And how could we see it if not for the language that makes it so?
Douglas Cole has published eight poetry collections, including The Cabin at the End of the World, winner of the Best Book Award in Urban Poetry. His novel, The White Field, won the American Fiction Award, and his screenplay of that book won the Best Unproduced Screenplay award in the Elegant Film Festival. Cole’s work has appeared in journals such as: Beloit Poetry, Fiction International, Valpariaso, The Gallway Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, and he contributes regularly to Jerry Jazz Musician magazine. Cole edits the American Writers section of Read Carpet, a journal of international writing produced in Columbia. He has been awarded the Leslie Hunt Memorial prize in poetry, the Best of Poetry Award from Clapboard House, First Prize in the “Picture Worth 500 Words” from Tattoo Highway, and the Editors’ Choice Award in fiction by RiverSedge. In addition, he has been nominated multiple times for both the Pushcart and the Best of the Net prizes.