#THE SLEEPLESS TOWN SAN SERVOLO PATCH#

#THE SLEEPLESS TOWN SAN SERVOLO PATCH#

Acceptable, I imagined, a patch of delicate down here and there, preferably blonde, nearly invisible. John Ruskin Confronts the Real Female Nude (April 10, 1847) I pictured my virgin naked, genuinely naked, baby smooth, Carrara white, and hairless. Dio crudel, keep me silent- to Iago’s god I pray: Keep father safe in Sumatra with no one to lead him to the Venetian light.ġ. I am evil because I am a man sings Iago that summer night in 1965, the Istrian stone gleaming pure under the stars. We follow the Moor who in his innocence believes himself a cuckold but is not while my absent father in his innocence trusts and is betrayed. In the dark Mario’s expert fingers forage in the folds of mother’s skirt. Powdered and scented, we ready for the open-air opera, my mother and I, and Mario poised between us as winds and strings intimate the coming storm and stage lights crash over the grand marble staircase, inaugurating the season of deceit. Sandy heat of summer, each putrid grain imbedded in sweat: no breeze in the courtyard of Palazzo Ducale where mother’s perfume almost obliterates the Venetian stench. Journal: “The Jewish Cemetery, Lido” and “Wall Moss” Hudson Review: “Urn” Inertia: “Lido” Jai-Alai Magazine: “To Forget Venice” New Republic: “Scirocco: Otello in Venice” Notre Dame Review: “Ambition of Sand” Paris Review: “At the Guggenheim Museum, Venice” Poetry International: “Rooftop: Aerial View” and “Brodsky at San Michele” Raritan: “Tadzio’s Mother,” “Titian’s Magdalena Speaks from Lazzaretto Nuovo, 1576,” and “Fondamente Nove” Sewanee Review: “Crossing” Southwest Review: “Callas in Venice”

Poems in this book have previously appeared, some in different versions, in the following publications: Harvard Review: “Mrs. Casanova 12 Titian’s Magdalena Speaks from Lazzaretto Nuovo, 1576 15 To Lenin from Venice 17 Wall Moss 20 ii Crossing 25 Arrivata 27 Rialto 29 Rooftop: Aerial View 30 Pact, 1968 34 Moon Walk 36 Canzoncino: Air for My Father 40 Urn 42 iii Ambition of Sand 45 At the Guggenheim Museum, Venice 47 Lido 49 Tramonto 51 At Sea 53Ĭallas in Venice 54 La Tempesta 58 Aubade 60 What I Meant To Say: In Memory of Michael Mazur, 1935–2009 61 Dream of the Chalice 66 Fondamente Nove 67 The Jewish Cemetery, Lido 68 Brodsky at San Michele, 1996 71 To Forget Venice 74 Notes 77 Effie Gray Ruskin Writes to Her Mother on Christmas Eve, 1850 7 Tadzio’s Mother 10 Mrs. John Ruskin Confronts the Real Female Nude (April 10, 1847) 5 2. To my sister Titi, who first gave me Venice, and to my husband Robert and our children: Gabe and Drew, Zack and Rachel, Lowell and EileenĪcknowledgments ix i Scirocco: Otello in Venice 3 The Ruskins 5 1. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2014 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Her previous books include Hard Bread and Honey with Tobacco, both published by the University of Chicago Press. She teaches poetry at Skidmore College and at the New York State Summer Writers Institute. Peg Boyers is executive editor of Salmagundi.

The university of chicago press Chicago & London Ranging over several stages of a life that features adolescent heartbreak and betrayal, marriage and children, friendship and loss, the book insistently addresses the author’s desire to get to the bottom of her obsession with a place that has imprinted itself so profoundly on her consciousness. The voices we hear in these poems belong not only to characters like the mother of Tadzio (think Death in Venice), or the companion of Vladimir Ilych Lenin, or the Victorian prophet John Ruskin and his wife, Effie, but also to wall moss, and sand, andmost especiallyan authorial speaker who in 1965, at age thirteen, landed in Venice and never quite recovered from the formative experiences that shaped her there.

The site of several unforgettable years of her adolescence, the place she has returned to more frequently than any other, the city of Venice is both adored and reviled by the speakers in this varied and unconventionally polyphonic work. To Forget Venice is the improbable challenge and the title of Peg Boyers’s newest collection of poems.

The sleepless town san servolo