Bicycle Thieves: Poems

By Mary di Michele

A masterwork from one of Canada’s most important poets

Referencing the post-war neorealist film by Vittorio De Sica, Mary di Michele’s Bicycle Thieves commemorates her Italian past and her life in Canada through elegy and acts of translation of text and of self.

The collection opens with a kind of hymn to life on the planet, sung from the peak of that urban island, Montreal — an attempt to see beyond death. The book moves into a sequence of poems described by Sharon Thesen as the poet “envisioning the passage of time under the ‘full and waning’ moon of Mount Royal’s beacon cross, recalling her Italian immigrant parents in Toronto and her current life in Montreal [. . .] a sort of Decameron.”

Thesen’s description is apt for the collection as a whole, which moves into the poet’s autobiography — in search of catharsis through literature — and pays tributes to poets who have been part of the literary landscape di Michele now inhabits. Bicycle Thieves is poetry as time machine, transcending the borders between life and death, language and culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ECW Press
• Release date: Apr 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9781773050119

Mary di Michele

Mary Di Michele was born in Italy and raised in Canada. She is the author of a previous novel, Under My Skin, a Harper's Magazine Notable Book, and eight books of poetry. She is a professor in the English Department of Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, where she lives.

Book preview

BANVILLE

CONTENTS

SCOTOPIA

i THE MONTREAL BOOK OF THE DEAD

NOW HE DRIVES A TAXI IN COMOX

THE MOUNTAIN AFTER KLEIN

THE BICYCLE THIEF

IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE

THE WINDS OF HOMECOMING

LEFT BEHIND

FORGETFULNESS

THE UNTEACHABLE

THE MONTREAL BOOK OF THE DEAD

THE POSSIBILITY OF TIME TRAVEL

LA VITA VECCHIA

THE TASTE OF LOSS

. . . AND THEN SHE WOKE UP

TURNING THIRTY TWICE OVER

BLACK DOG

ii LIFE SENTENCES

LIFE SENTENCES (An Autobiography in Verse)

iii AFTER

LIKE KAFKA’S APE (After Giorgio Caproni)

THE LIGHT IN EACH OF US (After Giorgio Caproni)

EVENING LIGHT (After Umberto Saba)

THE BLUE BOWING OF EVENING (After Dino Campana)

ARS POETICA (After Dino Campana)

ON STYLE (After Dino Campana)

BED OF ROSES (After Dino Campana)

LIFE IS A ROSE (Ronsard V)

On THE WAY TO THE VILLAGE STEAM BATHS (After Pier Paolo Pasolini)

THE BIG BANG

ENIGMATICO REVISITED

DE SICA’S LADRI DI BICICLETTE

ROBERT LOWELL READS AT SCARBOROUGH COLLEGE, CIRCA 1970

A POEM ABOUT ABSOLUTELY NOTHING

DEATH AND TRANSFIGURATION IN NEW YORK CITY (An Essay in Verse)

SOMEWHERE I HAVE NEVER TRAVELLED

AUTHOR’S NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

SCOTOPIA

Beacon shining from the top of Mount Royal,

a cross, unblinking under Capricorn.

Beaver Lake is iced over. The ring

in his pocket stays in his pocket.

In the shadow of the red-tailed hawk, what’s left

of a crow is now just tail feathers and wings

splayed out in the arms of a maple. To look is

to look away. Where the earth is flat we forget

we walk on a planet, but, from the view

at the summit, we remember

we are not alone, married and unmarried

alike, the stellar bridegroom

orbiting above, astronaut or angel,

watches over us from the stratosphere.

In a flash — we see what he sees — the city

below from space: the mystery

illuminated. This island city — this

island, Earth. Animal or mineral,

we all bow to the darkness,

we all turn in the light.

i

THE MONTREAL BOOK OF THE DEAD

Still to be so poised, so

Receptive. Still to recall, to praise.

— JAMES MERRILL

NOW HE DRIVES A TAXI IN COMOX

He remembers the darkness of winter

mornings when he was fifteen and helped

the milkman deliver milk door-to-door.

The wagon was drawn by a horse, hooves

on cobblestone, the only sound, and the milkman

humming under his breath while the boy

he was would run up to each house, a bottle

of milk in his hand, the glass slick with cold,

the wagon waiting, the horse stomping.

That was 1954, and before

the milkman bought his first truck; before

his father’s last transfer to the airbase

here in Comox. Now as he drives the taxi,

I transport him back — though nearly sixty years

have passed since those icy mornings, the boy

in him wakes up. Montreal is beckoning,

the city, luminous in his mind; he can see again

the copper dome of St. Joseph’s Cathedral

rising newly polished against the sky and not

blanched by snow and passing