Traces of Time

Culled from his entire career, the poems in Traces of Time cover numerous themes, most prominently the poet's relationship to history and how poetry can exist outside of it. "Tiananmen, 20 Years Later," "Protocols of War," and "Checkmate" (about 9/11) all illustrate Lucio Mariani's concerns "through images both dense and porous, lines both cadenced and spasmodic," and confirm his place in contemporary poetry. "Protocols of War"(Baghdad is not far) of this time you'll gather no memories for your eternal hunger. Can't you see the slags in the weave that enfolds the flesh of the living? Can't you see that the boxes and drawers where the silver of bygone days abounds have no room for trinkets or seashells of a present founded on plaster markets, lost facing a mirror seeking itself in the halls of the world? Don't you see that for the first time every man erects ruins for his heirs enacting inane protocols of war while the future slams its shutters tight so as to celebrate on statistical altars the glory of mindless marionettes maneuvered by nothingness, sprung in the bitter fields of oblivion? Of this time you'll gather no memories.