Morning After You (2014)
Morning After You is an articulate and deeply human new poetry collection by novelist and poet Carmelo Militano. Militano writes in a variety of styles: confessional, free verse, lyric, personal monologue, long poem, and prose poem. Each style is dense with sensual and evocative detail regardless of whether he is describing a city landscape, the sky, or the body of a woman. Militano’s poems also celebrate and mediate and seek to capture the complicated dual reality of being and seeing from two cultural perspectives. Militano’s use of direct language, image, and subtle ironic tone combine to create a unique and fresh voice in Canadian letters.
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“Militano has woven memory and desire into a sensuous kind of reason. Middle age takes hold of a poet amazed at ‘the crowd that is me,’ and such wisdom exposes the multiple, beautiful uncertainties typical of an ordinary life: as a husband, parent, dreamer. Just as Winnipeg as a city is a key poetic figure for the present, the Italy of forefathers is enlisted as an anchor for, and antidote to, melancholic contemplation in a cold climate. The poems are triumphs, as ‘what the mind holds and knows’ while skillfully carrying the tender heuristics of ‘what the heart insists.’”
“As well as the freshness inherent in being a foreigner, Militano’s eye for detail and his imagist approach work together with a fondness for unexpected angles and surrealistic effects. Frequent allusions to English literature combined with homely images from his native Calabria weave irony and a layer of suggestion, and lend sophistication and a European homeliness to classical effect. ”