Review of Leonard Cirino's THE INSTRUMENT OF OTHERS

I’ll tell you up front, this one’s going to be a little biased.  Leonard and I started corresponding around 1997 or ’98, and exchanged thoughts, poems and ideas for the rest of his life.  He did this with a lot of people, and I’m sure it made us all feel special.  Leonard’s generosity was one of his defining characteristics.  He wasn’t precious about his writing, like too many writers are these days.  He didn’t hide poems away, refusing to share them until they was published, as if the act of publishing would somehow increase their validity.  He constantly mailed (and, later, emailed) small unpublished collections to people he knew, just to let us see where he was in his writing.  I saved everything he ever sent, and I’m pretty sure the vast majority of it remains unpublished.

But anyway…..

THE INSTRUMENT OF OTHERS (published by RD Armstrong’s Lummox Press in 2012) was Leonard’s last collection, and an excellent representation of the style(s) he was pursuing in his maturity.   He was tired of contemporary “American” poetry, of (I think) the Bukowski-clone sensitive tough guy bullshit, the whiny-ass confessionalism, the semi-illiterate diary breathlessness that has come to define so much of non-academic American poetry in the 21^st century.  He read translations of European and Asian writers, writers probably unknown to most of us, and then he filtered their voices through his own ascetic to come up with a wholly unique style.  And he named the authors he was reading, which I love.  David Huerta is mentioned in this final collection, as is Deborah Digges (an American, with similar sensibilities to Cirino’s), as is Harry Martinson, and so on.  The section “Lazy Bones: Listening to the Earth” is comprised entirely of interpretations of works by a wide variety of Chinese poets.  And, in the end, everything on the page is pure Cirino.

Nature images abound in this book (indeed, in work throughout his career).  Nature, for Cirino, is a major aspect of spirituality.  Even his images of decay and ruin are presented with a hushed awe.  Life leads to death (and no one knows that better at this point than Cirino himself), and there is beauty in the entire spectrum of things.  These are the poems of a man who seems to be at peace with where he is, but who still digs up his past with a relentless curiosity.  They are the poems of a mystic with dirt on his hands. 

Anyone who knows Leonard’s story (I won’t go into it here) knows that rage, fear and regret also play large parts in his work.  The regret lingers in these poems, while both the rage and fear have become tempered with the resignation of accepted mortality.  The casual brutality of much of his past imagery persists, but now Cirino seems to see it all as part of a larger picture – it is now a passively observed phenomenon as opposed to a trigger for darker ruminations.  The last section of the book, the one inspired by Digges, seems to turn inward as it approaches the end.  The weight of her suicide weighs heavily on Cirino’s mind.  The ending of the final poem, Forty Years of Nightmares, is probably the best, most succinct piece of autobiography Leonard Cirino ever wrote:

I never had to stay in the dark of my room

or stand in a corner.   Life never punished me
until madness ran amok with my body,
my brain.  I could have been Frida
struck by a bus, or Deborah falling,
jumping from the stadium’s heights.
 

Let them cast lots among shadows like ghosts.

I know my place in the dark and the light.

After this, what else could he possibly say?

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Note:  while all of Leonard Cirino’s work was uniformly excellent, my own personal pick for his high point is the ’98 – ’01 period, which includes THE TERRIBLE WILDERNESS OF SELF, 96 SONNETS FACING CONVICTION, AMERICAN MINOTAUR and THE SANE MANE SPEAKS.  He was at the peak of his powers here, and these books are all essential reading.