Facing tough luck and locating compassion:
Another of Centolella's lovely balancing acts - between facing tough luck and locating compassion; between the good and bad examples of the past, living lithely in the present, and wondering over the courage the future may require.

Also, of course, as the title suggests, between "grim force" ("On the Way to Work") and "inspired chaos" ("What Helped"), and between East and West. As ever, Centolella's mind is on the Old World and the New, hand-coloring maps from Italy and Greece to Poland, and back to "prison yard, barnyard, box canyon,/ through a conference call, bedroom...," all our own daily troubles and delights. When called upon, the poet shares the perfectly awful disillusion of imperfect individuals, alive and dead. And shares with us, through paeans to nature ("Cholla, coyote, scampering quail/ with thier silly plume curling out/ of each head like a party favor"), to music ("bebop, hip-hop, acid house, trance, raga, salsa, a capella..."), and to tentative human vertices("Inviting to my touch, but cool at first./ Then warmer the longer I held you,") the reasons we might have; beginning, middle and end; to hope. "Let blindness/ afflict the figure of Justice. This angel brings/ her human hand to his, and softly sings/ her Grazie. There is no greater law than kindness."

"Ancestral" reassures us on the subject of ghostly judges: "They were a vexed/ and lonely and desperate bunch,/ the ones who came before us./ Did I mention that often/ they didn't know where/ they were going? Often they didn't/ know where they were going." The same poem reflects Centolella's wide reading in, and glad musing on, poetry itself and glorious diction: "Breath. Electricity. Foreknowledge/ of death. Many knew too well/ the dolor of doing nothing, many/ the despair of their best efforts/ not being good enough," might be a reply to Roethke's disembodied, "I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,/ Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight..."

Among those Centolella honors is Denise Levertov, for whom he wrote "Mentor" - wherein he notes well that there are ways to make-a-difference, without being prosaic about it. "Like you, I took the true path to be/ half fog, half rumor beneath my feet./ Like you, I kept going anyway."

"...so I kept walking, and soon/ the storefronts and the houses revealed a patina/ like gold leaf, the shabby stacks of apartments/ glistening like a honeycomb, and every face I passed/ owned a Mediterranean glow..." The long San Francisco poem "Drifting", contains anticipated examples of Centolella's gift with particulars. And again, continuing the stanza, of his goodhearted reverence for poetic forebears: "... - all of which I knew/ was only the low sun up to its old tricks." ("Busy old foole, unruly Sunne, why dost thou thus?!")

Along the way, in this fine addition to Centolella's remarkable body of handsomely-published work, is his "Calling": an internal monologue, a tactile interior scene. "Later, putting away the red pears/ and the provolone, a white onion,/ a sunburst squash -everything with a name/ and a place to which it belonged -/ you realized why you'd been convinced/ you were invisible: you lived outside/ your time. Your era was not inconsequential/ but your name seemed to be..." "And yet," he completes the thought at poem's end, "you could be called by someone/ in need, whom you might never see again,/ or who might fail to remember you -/ fail to give you your due - you could be called/ and you would choose, almost/ without thinking, to answer." ( )