intro

        The poems in Satyr's Wife call up worlds gained through travel or reading: Italy, China, mythic time, the consciousness of Keats. Wherever the poem goes, a literal landscape or a text, there's an urgency to the way it moves, as if the voice is looking for something it might die without. The writer and literary scholar Richard Maxwell, who has sometimes taught Rita Signorelli-Pappas's poems, has a nice analysis. These poems “seem at first to inhabit familiar cultural landmarks: Ovidian myth, Venice, the Appian Way, a still-life by Matisse. But understatement and delicacy of touch release a transformative power. These lyrics appropriate myth or Matisse with a smooth, almost insidious thoroughness, then subtly change direction; indeed, there is always one more shift, at least, than the reader has anticipated. And some of the endings have a wonderful way of negating everything that has come before, while seeming to propose, to bring into being, a whole new poem, one that we are just now prepared to read.”

         Those surprising shifts in direction are, I think, what makes these poems retain their mystery. I love the way Pappas so viscerally absorbs herself in her material and then subverts the narrative somehow, either with a jump from Ovid's time to ours: “Somewhere white eagles rush down / like searchlights through the pines,” or through female-centered perspectives, as in the hypnotic and erotic “Apollo and Daphne,” or in these lines from “Arachne,”: “or it might have been / the slow hand of Zeus travelling a woman's body and / when she finally emerged from the long tunnel of silk / she saw that her own body hung exposed / in a shimmering web she was dead no she was alive”.

         Pappas's work has the lush intensity of poems by Sylvia Plath or Louise Glück, but her vision is particularly hers—gorgeous, but never merely so—there's a hard precision and even a brutal turn to some of the passages I admire most as in, “Moths”: At noon new griefs / hang in the window shade / like the shadows of a thousand bees / that dissolved into a crimson cloud, / then came back to bead my mirror / with a sudden mist of blood.”

         Maybe all poets are in exile, living as they do in these alternate terrains made of words. But I think of the poet Rita Signorelli-Pappas as writing from a particular site of displacement. An east coast native who spent her early life in various New Jersey cities (and who now lives in Princeton), she lived and wrote for two decades in semi-rural Valparaiso, Indiana—a place with white-out, icy winters, a hearty tradition of popcorn festivals and basketball fandom, and the town motto “Vale of Paradise.” That's where we became friends, so I'm glad she landed there, but especially because for Rita, though it might not be an obviously literary or exotic setting, it turned out to be a great place to write. There was the university library, and there were those long winters, when one might look up from the desk out the window and see nothing but thick snow, like another clean sheet of paper.

        There's only a little of that literal landscape in the poems here, as in “I run into Count Ugolino on the autumn day when / I finally start scraping frost from my windshield.” (“I Run Into Count Ugolino”). The speaker is driving to Indianapolis with Dante, who has become a scholar now, “writing an impassioned essay on the émigré poet / that he will read at 2 o'clock this afternoon / in a hotel ballroom somewhere in the city.” Dante's creation, Count Ugolino, is also in the car, blithely off and on gnawing on Ruggiero's head. In The Inferno, the Count is trapped in ice up to his neck, stuck in the ninth circle of hell for treason, doomed to cannibalize the head of his betrayer. In her typical (and fascinating) fashion, Pappas doesn't refer to this hell-ice directly in the poem, allowing the allusion to emerge from the landscape. And the Count's chewing on the head is treated with black humor, not horror, until the poem masterfully juxtaposes a more ruminative tone against the joking asides. The Count's consuming of the head starts to seem industrious---he nibbles on a pencil, linking his voraciousness to writing. At the end of the poem, the speaker channels both Dante and the Count. She may be trapped in this wintry landscape, but with a wild and ravenous mind:

         It goes on—the deep longing / for thought, the wind's feverish reverie as it strips / the orchard of leaves. It goes on—the rumination of memory, / the mind's profusion caught in a rubbing click and chirr. / It happens over and over. The way the eyes begin / to narrow. The snap of jaws starting to work.

        Most of these poems have been previously published in literary magazines, and it's wonderful to finally have them gathered together in the collection Satyr's Wife, which I hope will find many more readers. Rita Pappas's poems not only seduce one into reading and re-reading, but they give the act of writing a new radiance:

         I sat at the table to shape
         these dark fading syllables,
         this black salt tossed into
         the empty cauldron of spring.

—René Steinke