The Place I Call Home
Maria Mazziotti Gillan
NYQ Books
ISBN: 978-1-935520-67-2

Reviewer: CL Bledsoe


          In these fifty-two poems, Gillan chronicles the life of an Italian immigrant girl, presumably herself, the child of immigrants who worked and sacrificed to give her and her siblings a better life. Gillan’s collection is a meditation on home, whether the home of her childhood, the home of her married life, or the home she lives in now. Location is an important element, but the people who share the home are the true glue Gillan focuses on. She begins with “That Sound Carries Me toward Childhood,” a meditation on her mother’s voice: “It is dark. I swear I hear my mother calling, though it is/ fifteen years since she died and more than fifty years/ since we lived in the 17th Street apartment that I think of/ when I think of my childhood….” Gillan paints a vivid portrait of her childhood home, its garden full with “corn stalks taller/ than any of us, its vines heavy with tomatoes, the air/ tangy with herbs, rosemary, oregano, and mint and the tart/ aroma of zucchini and eggplant." She describes capturing fireflies, eating homemade snacks, listening to radio programs, and playing games. All of these things Gillan describes no longer exist; as she explicitly states, the mentioned family members are all dead, but they live on in her memory. Even though there’s pain and loss in these memories, there’s also hope and joy. As Gillan states in “My Mother Used to Wash My Hair,” she is still surprised by beauty, “the broken world/ still filled with so much surprising grace.” Her hope and salvation walk hand-in-hand with her poetic spirit.

          Gillan has captured a portrait of a vanished time. In “I Grew Up with Tom Mix,” she describes radio shows from her childhood and their simple, broadly-drawn morals: “The good guys always wore white hats/ so it was easy to tell them from the bad guys.” Listening to these programs was a family activity. “We’d pull kitchen chairs up to the counter/ on the built-in china closet, and in the kitchen,// heated by a huge black iron coal stove, we’d listen….” Gillan’s poems are full of evocative images. She explains the escape offered by these programs. “Our real world had boundaries built by my Italian parents// and the streets we were allowed to travel.” But these programs were a safe way to travel, a safe world in which “no hero we loved and admired ever died.” In the world of Gillan’s youth, fathers worked hard (usually at factories) to support their families, doing whatever it took. Mothers stayed home and raised the kids and cooked and cleaned. Gillan doesn’t comment on gender or social roles other than how they relate to the lives of her characters. She doesn’t critique stereotypes; she presents this world, warts and all.

          Gillan also writes about her own experiences raising her children, worrying about their happiness, and later, her husband’s illness and eventual death. Her poems are visceral, though simply structured, and taut with emotion. A common theme for these poems is Gillan’s fear for the health and safety of others. “The Other Night, You Came Home” describes her husband’s reaction to his own sickness. He has a picture taken for a parish book and then has the realization, “I really look sick,/ don’t I?” She can’t comfort him because the truth has been captured egregiously in a picture, so she’s torn. The power of this poem comes from Gillan’s restraint. She describes her husband’s appearance without lapsing into melodrama. She describes the slowness of his movements, the lies they tell each other rather than dealing with the truth of his mortality. Gillan explains, “the lies// have become the crutch I use to get through each day, the face/ in my own mirror, one I can no longer stand to see.” Her husband’s mortality is exposed through the photograph, but Gillan’s own fear and impotence are also revealed. In “How Do I Pack Up the House of My Life?” she confronts her shame over how freeing it is for her invalid husband to be away (either hospitalized or in an institution, it’s unclear). He tells her that his medicine stopped working at 2 p.m. She laments, “You have// not been able to move since then. It is now/ nearly midnight.” Her husband is afraid of what will happen to him. She describes a conversation with him:

…I hear the trembling

in your voice and the shame in my own heart
for the way my life is opening up. Yours

is slamming closed. There is no medicine
for the sound guilt makes at 3 a.m.

          She lies awake, thinking of her husband, unable to move or complete tasks because of his unspecified illness, while she enjoys the peace and solitude of her apartment. But, of course, Gillan is being quite hard on herself: she clearly isn’t enjoying this new lifestyle, since she’s so wracked with guilt. In the same way that her earlier memories brought her joy, the memories of her husband’s death overshadow her happier memories of him and haunt her.

          Gillan’s poems are straight-forward in tone and style. She confronts tragedy again and again and manages to find hope each time, which is a heroic achievement. Gillan also uses the platform of her children’s and grandchildren’s lives to discuss global issues, such as the earthquake in Japan, Bratz dolls and their effects on the self-esteem of her grandchildren, and the natural world. In the final poem in the collection, Gillan gives us an image of hope. The poem, “The Ducks Walk across River Street, Paterson, New Jersey,” describes a family of ducks crossing traffic. “All the cars, in both directions, stop to let them go by,” she states, surprisingly. She continues:

…How self-contained

the ducks are, all of us watching them, the people
in their cars heading to work, the homeless men

mumbling or staring at the trees trailing their long fingers
in the river, the ducks certain in their smooth feathers

that the road and the river are theirs by right…

          The audacity of the ducks is invigorating, reaffirming. Gillan chose well to end the book with this piece, because, just as the onlookers are pulled from themselves and their own interests by the ducks, so are her readers. We realize that there is beauty both inside and outside of ourselves.