Grace Cavalieri
Owning the Not So Distant World
Blue Light Press
Reviewer: Brian Fanelli
In her latest collection, Owning the Not So Distant World, Grace Cavalieri taps into memory through very specific images, be it a wedding dress or old furniture, to recount youth, the early stages of a relationship, and also loss. Her new work very much addresses the past, creating a powerful feeling of longing. At the same time, her work manages to praise everyday beauty, which we sometimes take for granted. It’s an impressive book, with several poems that warrant more than one read.
The beginning of the collection manages to capture the early stages of a relationship and then its dissolution. Whether the poems in Owning the Not So Distant World are autobiographical or not doesn’t really matter. Cavalieri portrays feelings that are highly relatable to readers, especially young love and loss. For instance, who can’t relate to the desire to impress a lover, especially upon first meeting or after they’ve been away for a while? The poet captures this feeling so well in “White Suit,” again using a very specific image as an entry point. The poem begins, “I always loved one and so when Ken came back from / Australia / I bought a crisp linen suit just to greet him wearing white / spectator pumps red toes and heels / they don’t make them anymore / and a polka dot blouse red and white dots with a bow through / now I wonder if it was such a good idea.”
That poem is one example of what works so well with this collection. Cavalieri has a talent for creating detailed visuals and scenes. That’s true with “White Suit,” as well as most of the poems in the collection. She introduces this relationship between the speaker and Ken with that vivid description of clothing, and yet, the poem takes quite a turn with the line, “now I wonder if it was such a good idea.” The speaker then goes on to recount young love, the fact that Ken was nineteen and she was seventeen, as well as the fact he’d been gone for “18 long months.” While their letters may have been passionate, that meeting didn’t match the written word.
Near the end of the poem, she writes, “We should have flung into each other’s arms acting out all / those words and all those letters but without the emotional / wherewithal it was a dam that could not break.” When I reread this poem, and though I realized it was written about an experience several decades ago, I couldn’t help but think how relevant it is today. In fact, in a way, it made me think of online dating, of expectations, of two people who message and message on a dating app, but when that meeting eventually occurs, it’s nothing like what was imagined or planned. Cavalieri depicts the excitement and disappointment so well.
The poem also circles back to the letters, the possibility, and perhaps the imagined, with the closing lines, “I hung my white suit carefully in the closet wrapped the shoes / back in plastic and reached into the drawer for his beautiful / large packet of letters.” To add, the poem is largely without punctuation and mostly enjambed. The form captures the rush of excitement the speaker initially felt, as well as the waves of emotion.
In “Simple Acts,” the poet again addresses young love, but also, as the poem title indicates, the simple acts of life that are very much worthy of poetry and art. This is an undercurrent throughout the collection. Cavalieri has a knack for showcasing those moments that maybe too often we don’t stop to ponder and appreciate. The poem reads:
It was getting in a hot car
and driving up the bright street
turning left
I think it was the thought of
cooking a turkey for the family
and the children looking friendly
climbing off the school bus
It was coffee by the pool
a long red dress
the plans for a wedding
It was the bird staying still on the
branch long enough to see.
It’s not totally clear if the plans for the wedding refer to the speaker, and her looking back on the build-up to the wedding day, but that doesn’t quite matter. It’s again all the details and images that make the poem. On the one hand, the wedding plans should be paramount, but instead, the speaker focuses on some of the other details, such as the red dress, coffee by the pool, and a bird on the line. Perhaps that’s how memory truly works. We recall the finer details and those fragments of a specific day.
“Simple Acts” concludes with an image deferring to the natural world when the bird is introduced, and the natural world factors heavily into the collection overall, especially in poems that come later in the book. In “Your Awe Is Not My Awe,” Cavalieri praises nature over acts of war. It’s a powerful and potent poem, especially in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and atrocities in Gaza. The poem is a constant push and pull, a contrast between man-made bombs and natural beauty. She begins, “My awe is a sacred place, a bird flying to the feeder / the shade of a tree / berries in the forest / not rockets of light.”
By starting with that image of the bird at the feeder, Cavalieri immediately elevates the natural world and animals over war. This continues throughout the rest of the poem. For instance, in a middle stanza, she adds, “My awe is a clear path of vision, / the razor straight edge of sky / a plumb where water is moved by stone.” Additionally, the poet frequently praises the power of art and writing throughout the collection; for example, in “Your Awe Is Not My Awe,” which concludes with the lines, “My awe is the milk of the moon shining on these words / that come from me and will not return empty.” That last couplet again praises the natural world, in this case the moon, but also the act and power of writing itself.
Cavalieri’s Owning the Not So Distant World feels like a balm for our troubled times. These are poems that sing of new love, no matter how imperfect it may be, yet the collection also addresses failed marriages and the healing that comes after. Meanwhile, poems like “Your Awe Is Not My Awe” pay tribute to the allurement of the natural world. Cavalieri addresses everything from heartache to war, her collection both uplifting and inspiring.
