Green Nights / Golgotha / Love's Quarrel: Poems 2001-2003

Published in Belgrade, Serbia, in one volume, what each of these three books of poetry by Richard Milazzo - Green Nights, Golgotha, and Love's Quarrel - have in common is the desire to balance the extrinsic demands of story with the more intrinsic ones of subtle, formal invention, refusing to sacrifice the human dimension to the Modernist, mechanistic fallacy of objectivity. The discursive impulse here, even at its most abstract, parallels the author's travels from city to city, evolving the 'hotel poem' to sustained (stanzaic) form. Green Nights takes place mostly in Mexico, Brittany, and Palermo; Golgotha, in Paris and Marseille; Love's Quarrel, in Palermo and California. And, in between, we find the author in Corfu, Berlin, Zürich, London, Pineland (New Jersey), and Brussels, in Alexandria and along the Nile, and in New York, and dialoguing with Michelangelo, Pisanello, Goya, Gauguin, Max Jacob, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Ibn Hamdîs. Not to mention the poor and the revolutionary leader in Mexico, Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, and the author's family in the decadent and dying but still strangely resplendent city of Palermo in Sicily. "It's not that narrative, the story," the author explains, "closes down interpretation; it's that our powers of description fail us just when we need them most, when we are confronted by even the smallest phenomena of nature. What is description; what is the case if it is not, as Wittgenstein says, something like the totality of facts that gives us the world; what is the slavish imitation the sky and earth if it is not pure awe, affection, thralldom, the astonishment we feel when we are stunned by the realizations of life and the living we have not done and cannot do because it is invariably always too late - too late to capture the moment that is always just past or just before us?"