Winner
of the 2009 Bordighera Poetry Prize:
Sponsored by the Sonia Raiziss-Giop Foundation
Carla Panciera
of MA. for
No Day, No Dusk, No Love
1st
Runner-up: Joseph Di Prisco of CA.
Awards
Ceremony, Nov. 5th, 2009. All Welcome!
John
D. Calandra Institute CUNY, Mid-Manhattan
Where
We Were
| This Is What It Means|
Here's to John Grimes
 Carla
Panciera
of Massachusetts, for her manuscript, No Day, No Dusk, No
Love,
is winner of the 2009 annual Bordighera Poetry Prize for $2,000
and bilingual
book publication by Bordighera Press. Carla
will receive $1,000 and a $1,000 honorarium will go to her Italian
translator. Carla Panciera has published fiction, memoir, and
poetry in many journals, including The New England Review,
The Chattahoohee Review, Nimrod, Painted Bride, and The
Clackamas Review. Her first collection of poetry, One
of the Cimalores, received the Cider Press Book Award and
was published in 2005. A high school English teacher, she lives
in Rowley, MA, with her husband and three daughters.
Distinguished
Poet Judge for 2009-20010, Patricia Fargnoli, wrote of Panciera's
poems: No Day, No Dusk, No Love, has everything: every
poem is consistently excellent. These are mostly lyrics, deceptively
simple poems rooted in a strong sense of place: rivers, ocean,
pond, farm and in an equally strong sense of the importance of
human connections and the aching/longing when they are lost. The
craft in the poems is impeccable; the rhythms are easy, yet haunting.
Panciera makes much use of internal rhyme, alliteration, assonance,
consonance…all the tools of a poet who has learned her craft
well and practiced it long. The images are specific, original
, and imaginative. Seaweed, for example, is like a woman’s
scarf; wind “makes a sea” of a river; a maple tree
becomes “Narcissus.” But, even more than these, what
finally made this manuscript leap to the top of the pile was the
way the poems arrived at their stunning truths and sensitive questions:
“Why return to a place we know so well” the author
asks in “Half Moon Pond, Summer 2005;” or in “For
My Mother Who Has Never Been to the Cape: “No one has lived
here forever./ They walk so far along the beach they disappear.”
; or these lovely lines from “This Time of Day:” “No
day, no dusk, no love, begins or ends in a moment;/ no day, no
dusk, no love repeats its beauty or its sadness.” These
are poems that desperately, beautifully “matter” and
deserve reading again and again. I congratulate their maker.
The
Bordighera Poetry Prize was founded by Daniela
Gioseffi, poet/author, and Alfredo
de Palchi, poet and trustee of The Sonia Raiziss-Giop Foundation,
in 1997. Each judge serves for a two-year term. Guidelines for
entry, winners, and judges at: Bordighera
Prize Guidelines. Anthony J Tamburri is a founding editor/publisher
of Bordighera Press with Fred Gardaphe
and Paolo Giordano.
Sample
poems by Carla Panciera follow:
WHERE
WE WERE
The day Kennedy was shot, I rode in the grain cart
on a burlap sack, pajamas sticky with molasses.
My sister scooped around me, tossing cows their rations.
The pipeline’s vacuum pulsed. Cows sighed and grunted.
Pellet by pellet, I ate before the batting heads of Holsteins.
My sister sang I Could Have Danced All Night, then left to take
a bath for school.
My father sang O Solo Mio, set me on his lap, my hand on cow belly.
The stool tied around his hips followed us udder to udder.
Tails swirling, the dogs dashed in as if with news. My father
shooed them.
The manure spreader was busted, the grain bill overdue.
The next day, when the barn doors opened, old Faith and Lettie,
bull-shouldered Olive, all the rest, plodded to their places,
hollered for food.
One dog sliced its paw open; the other licked it clean.
That’s how it goes, my father said. Ignore them and they’ll
heal each other.
My sister pushed the grain cart with me atop, different pajamas.
My father sang Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime.
THIS
IS WHAT IT MEANS: ALLEGORY
--for
Beatrice
What you want is a turtle.
Unless I find one trawling grass
on her way to an egg spot,
how can I deliver this wish?
So I bring you to the window
and show you:
Two turtles on a log.
Not good enough,
so I add: They're having a statue contest.
Blinking is allowed, as is
craning their wrinkly necks
for a turtleneck of sun.
Observation, your silence
is not unexpected. Your world
has always been quiet
as a pond.
The duck wiping a mirror
free of algae should not
be a distraction, I say.
Nor should the jug strum
of the bull frog
that loveless neighbor.
But you want a turtle
the way you wanted
a second piercing
in your ear,
a third dog,
root beer.
And you, Persistence,
could achieve this.
On your quads used
to handsprings,
back walkovers, tricks
unimaginable to the carapaced,
to the middle-aged,
you can frog-crouch forever.
The flies are playing, too,
the ultimate game
of chicken. They’re gambling
that statues don’t have appetites.
Tolerance. A sigh.
Archetype you restate your question
without speaking:
Is this something my mother can do?
You are Possibility
who looks at me one more time
as if the edges aren't blurred with reeds,
the branch in the pond’s true center.
Why isn’t it enough, the idea alone?
The idea and this devoted listener.
It will only be a little longer
before you understand.
Before Knowledge, before Fear.
Your mother can’t get those turtles
despite your wishing.
Her only net
is story.
HERE’S
TO JOHN GRIMES
buried
in the woods, 1764, who sought
no company eternally but had himself laid down
in the humus of the forest floor,
no more, John Grimes, no record of his birth,
of where he lived and if he loved and what his work
had been, but whose tombstone asks all who pass
to add a stone, and here it grows in silence
under trees, stone upon stone, the ground for paces
around, soft as flesh, and still
the living pause and hunt, compelled to honor one
who loved these woods or solitude
or tribute, until two hundred years the hands, the hands,
that made this pile then went on pointing out the birds
have been reduced to bone and less, and our hands now
so warm with stones we’ve walked awhile to find
contribute, so we can move back through copper light
that leaves above and underfoot produce as if
to gild us in the myth that we, too, will be remembered.
_____________________________________________________________
Copyright
© 2009 by Carla Panciera from No Day, No Dusk, No Love, Bordighera
Press @ Calandra Institute, NY, 2009.
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