Skirts and Slacks

by W.S. Di Piero

W. S. Di Piero, a fresh and powerful voice in American poetry, opens this collection about public and private worlds with poems that revisit the deaths of his parents. It is an important adult passage for him, and for them a last chance to leave a message: his father lying in bed, “bemused and contemptuous / of the hell in which he lay”; his mother soon to be laid out in the cheap gold flats “that made her look young and men look twice.” Di Piero writes poems of relationships, of ordinary beauty, of the deep, visceral memories that shape who we become. He reveals the art in the everyday—sometimes literally, as when he spies a Vermeer beauty in a girl with nose studs at the ATM, or van Gogh’s self-portrait in a small-time bookie. Whether describing the uncertainty of sexual love (“. . . your footpads / wet after a bath / left prints like / our conversations / every which way”) or a panhandler in Port Authority (“Show you to your bus / or an excellent candy bar?”), he is delicate and direct at once, a no-nonsense guide to his surroundings who is moved by what he sees. His strong, elegantly simple statements of truths of feeling go beyond the pleasure of the words themselves and restore us to the thrill of honesty in our own lives.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published May 22, 2001

About the author

William Simone Di Piero was born in 1945 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and earned degrees from St. Joseph’s College and San Francisco State College. A poet, essayist, art critic, and translator, Di Piero has taught at institutions such as Northwestern University, Louisiana State University, and Stanford, where he is professor emeritus of English and on faculty in the prestigious Stegner Poetry Workshop. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001, Di Piero was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2012.

Di Piero’s poetry is known for its gritty realism. Populated with characters and settings reminiscent of the South Philadelphia neighborhood of his boyhood and the Italian-American working-class families he grew up with, Di Piero’s poetry frequently makes use of colloquial language and diction.

An award-winning translator of Italian poetry, Di Piero’s first translation, Giacomo Leopardi's Pensieri, was nominated for a National Book Award. Other translations include Sandro Penna's This Strange Joy, which received the Academy of American Poets Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Award, Leonardo Sinisgalli's The Ellipse (1982) and Night of Shooting Stars (2011), and a translation of Euripides’s Ion.

W.S. Di Piero has won numerous honors and awards for his work, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund. He lives in San Francisco.

Reviews

[Tung · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title of this poetry collection by di Piero reflects, I think, a common theme that runs across all of the poems: that although people are not the sum total of their possessions, everyday objects (or actions) can and do say much about our characters; and often, these plain, commonplace objects or actions can reflect little pearls of beauty. For example, in the poem “Finished Basement”, di Piero is describing his mother and conveys a whole history of her character through a short phrase about her shoes – “cheap gold flats that made her look young and men look twice”. And throughout this collection, there are similar insights tied to objects. From a technical standpoint, I enjoyed his choice of words and phrases, but I found that the rhythms that you often find embedded in good poetry to be a bit inconsistent. In my favorite poems in the book (“The Apples” and “South End”) they were so fluid it made you read them twice. In a few of the other strong poems, you can feel the force behind the cadence of the language, and reading them makes you almost feel like the words are being spit out at you, the force is so strong (“Skirts and Slacks” and “The Bull Roarers”, for example). However, in a few of them, the language seems rather dry, and I found the inserted stanza breaks to be unnatural (especially in “Oregon Avenue on a Good Day”, “Leaving Bartram's Garden in Southwest Philadelphia”, and “UFO”). Overall, a solid poetry collection. Recommended.

[david · Rating 3 out of 5]

kind of boring, really. though a handful of passages did stand me hairs up