A new work of poetry from Gary Percesepe, “The Girl of my Dream” out now!
Gary Percesepe’s new poetry collection The Girl of My Dream takes its title from the opening pages of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.: “Little by little the memory of her would fade, I had forgotten the girl of my dream.” Like a bite of the fabled Proustian madeleine, the reader is drawn into reverie, a dreamscape of places, names, scents, and laments for lost time, both its illusions and rewards.
The book is anchored by an off-kilter story of an encounter between a film student and a cop in rural Illinois at the scene of a wreck.
Tipped is an unlikely and at times hilarious clash of perspectives which nevertheless merge into the same_ lane with two sleeves of art and an unexpected visit by Italian film star Sophia Loren.
At the heart of the book is a floating reverie of sadness and griefremembered that takes us from Trieste to New York City painted gray on gray in the temporal space of November-years of November. Readers explore literary “tips of the hat” to writers as different as Proust, Kerouac, and Che~wer, prose poems alongside villanelles and haiku in search of the forgotten girl of the dream.
“Poems simultaneously street-smart and softly lyrical, they sing the hard-edges of love’s brief rapture … Percesepe announces himself as our twentieth century O’Hara” – Kara Candito, author of “Taste of Cherry” and “Spectator”
THE GIRL OF MY DREAM
by Gary Percesepe reviewed by Tim Suermondt
It’s only fitting that the title of the prolific Gary Percesepe’s latest book is taken from Marcel Proust whose style, Proustian, is recognized and debated worldwide. And now we have Percesepetian and the wonderful range that continues to dazzle—there’s high intellect alongside street smarts, art films alongside a box of donuts, musings on writers, and of course the world of relationships in their highest form alongside the very bawdy. Let’s dive a bit into the Percesepe world and swim among its treasures.
There is a melancholy that pervades the love poems. And how could it be otherwise, love being one of the most complicated things on earth. Yet, Percesepe knows the joys of love too and he doesn’t hold back when giving his takes. In the opening poem he ends with a sailors chant You will meet the girl of your dream but from the instant you meet you will never stop thinking of llosing her. The atmosphere of many of the poems are movielike in the portrayals, whether exotic locales, suburban houses or a city apartment and those glorious beds, his language often spot-on, sometimes strange, always interesting. A few of my favorites: They will stroll beside the aborted canal and pause to watch a/black train, In the beds of women all my life I sought to sleep like God in/France, Mazarine sat beside me in a booth near the plate glass window/It felt like the beginning of an evening./ We return in our memory to what is unfinished. Proust would have been pleased.
I mentioned writers earlier and I think they fit nicely into the collection. Some titles: Raymond Chandler Tries His Hand at Socratic Dialectic, Kerouac in Paris, someone tweeted f. scott fitzgerald reciting ode to a nightingale, and my favorite Cheever in Westchester. Here’s the lovely ending to that poem:
Kings in gold mail rode elephants form Versailles,
New York’s river light can dispel all our fear.
The choice of love is open till we die.
Carry the sun in a small golden cup.
There are also prose pieces in the collection. They have a downhome feel to them, but are not diminished because of that. Dr. Gallop is a hoot—the son talking to the mother in heaven and being told it’s boring there, very boring. “Go to hell, Bob,” my mother said. “it’s more exciting.” Sunday Morning is an evocative look at Brooklyn and a young marriage that failed, the narrator fueled by a song by Kris Kristofferson as he walks and reflects, giving us this: No memory is innocent. Every thought has its joys and its bruises.
And one can’t overlook Tipped, a chance, strange encounter between a state trooper and a
student, both of them winding up watching a Sophia Loren film and rewinding the pain of that film, and the timeless beauty of love itself.
And speaking of film, Percesepe’s prose poem Cathedral reminds me of the opening flashes of Citizen Kane—where a brief sight of someone lovely can stay with a person forever, the rain and the fog, her navy-blue cape and the umbrella in the poem, how we remember.
The Girl Of My Dream continues to display Percesepe’s breadth, a writer who writes about his world, but also about the world at large. And how can you not love a poet who mentions Walter Benjamin? In one poem, he writes: Please God let this poem be the last. It won’t be. Gary Percesepe will be writing many more poems, many more books, for the benefit of us all. Let him have the last word:
Like a note slipped under your door
you’d have been better off to ignore her
but the lamp in the room that you carry
burns bright without a bulb, and we lose
ourselves in others, even as the light divides us.
“Second Try” published in The Christian Century
“The Conversation” published in The Christian Century
“Kairos Election” published in The Christian Century