The poems included in this book are remarkable due to magnificent qualities of imagination, and compel our admiration. These ingenious, touching and eloquent poems are written in spontaneous style. Many of these poems show the poet’s most impassioned moods, and are characterised by impressive felicity of style and subtle diction.
REVIEW by Gary Kern
Peter Dellolio is the author of a book of surrealist visions, “A Box of Crazy Toys” (Xenos Books, 2018), in which the game seems to be whether the reader can visualize images composed by word combinations alone, not by matching words to images seen or remembered, which is the normal way. For example:
A tiger with red clarinets
for legs is confused by
droplets of blood.
Or:
The auditorium is filled
with thousands of cacti
in glowing infection costumes.
Brittle bamboo fences
rattling in the wind
clack like oyster castanets.
If you can see it, it must be for the first time, and perhaps the brain has expanded a little. Some of the poems, filled with unprecedented combinations, are very hard to see, only they're not poems, rather “liquid landscapes,” as he calls them.
He's also the author of a series of original stories recently published online. “Patience Is the Companion of Wisdom” reads like a classic, only not Borges, not Machado de Assis, not Hemingway... You can't place it, but it belongs in that class. Look for it.
His latest production is “Bloodstream Is An Illusion,” and it's easier to get in tune with it than with the challenging “Crazy Toys.” Again, it’s not exactly poetry -- there's no attempt to make a lyrical, rhythmical or symmetrically constructed piece. These are verbal combinations based on our natural propensity to animate inanimate objects, to personify non-personal things, to anthropomorphize non-anthropoid creatures. Seeing the images released reveals a different area of the mind.
For example, do you stare at the rug and see images of Indians, pumas, sculptures of Michelangelo? When putting away the dishes, do you notice a glass that's been standing in the back for a week and wonder if it's mad for having been left and not used? If so, you're ready for:
An avalanche of
vests
but somehow all the
buttons reassembled in
vertical rows.
The waterfall had
crooked bow ties
and was jealous.
We're looking in a closet, right? There are also purely imaginary situations:
Penguins
confused
by thousands of
large salt and pepper shakers.
There are lots of these, and they're lots of fun. But there's also a somber theme developing out of the rubies and bloodstream images, the shadows, whispers, coffins... Occasionally Dellolio throws in an aphorism: “Whispering in halls of marble is the nobility of regret.” And again: “Wealth of the shadows / spinning and dancing / confusing and misleading / the poverty of our minds.”
What begins as a casual visit to a display of word games and visual associations steadily becomes more serious. There is an unseen form or mood creeping in. The compositions do not look or read like regular poems, but they begin to emit a powerful effect. As with his other work, this is truly original. It's not pretty, it's hardly recognizable as poetic and even seems haphazard, but it's truly original, and that's the main thing. |
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| Author BIO |
| Peter J. Dellolio |
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Born 1956 New York City. Went to Nazareth High School and New York University. Graduated 1978: B.A. Cinema Studies; B.F.A. Film Production. Wrote and directed various short films, including James Joyce’s short story Counterparts which he adapted into a screenplay. Counterparts was screened at national and international film festivals. A freelance writer, Peter has published many 250-1000 word articles on the arts, film, dance, sculpture, architecture, and culture, as well as fiction, poetry, one-act plays, and critical essays on art, film, and photography. Poetry collection “A Box Of Crazy Toys” published 2018 by Xenos Books/Chelsea Editions. He is working on a critical study of Alfred Hitchcock, Hitchcock’s Cinematic World: Shocks of Perception and the Collapse of the Rational. Chapter excerpts have appeared in The Midwest Quarterly, Literature/Film Quarterly, Kinema, Flickhead, and North Dakota Quarterly since 2006.
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| Other Publication By Peter J. Dellolio |
Peter J. Dellolio
ISBN: 9789395224819
Peter J. Dellolio
ISBN: 9788119654406
Peter J. Dellolio
ISBN: 9789363542501
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