VENICE
By Ange Mlinko

Ange Mlinko’s poems are driven by an unusual combination of impulses. They are formal, highly polished, with hard, smooth surfaces and dense interiors, the products of intense, serious craftsmanship. But while official so often suggest stayed or restricted, Mlinko’s poems are anything but. They are wild, energetic, lively, unreasonably Catholic in their allusiveness, often downright talkative. Some have the feel of postcards, especially in their opening lines. “The hotel showers were magnificently lavish,” begins a poem in “Venice,” Mlinko’s sixth collection. The next begins: “After the olivine waves of Marina di Torre del Lago, / we drive between colonnades of umbrella pines.”

Elsewhere the tone is more philosophically speculative: “In or around 1929 the character of dreams changed. And sometimes it’s brutal, direct, urgent. A poem at the end of the book begins, “We don’t have much time.” The situation he goes on to describe is specific and immediate, but as with so many of Mlinko’s phrases, it is impossible to ignore the obscure second meaning that hovers over the first: that we as a species are running out of time. , that it may already be too late. This anxiety is omnipresent in “Venice”. Poem after poem, everyday events generate dark, sometimes nightmarish overtones. Consider, for example, this stanza, spoken by a plant scholar, from the poem “In the Nursery”:

“And moreover, if the roots do not dig
under the house and re-twig
inside by cracks in the foundation,
there is still damage,
and history will testify
with countless raised eyelids.

A change occurs halfway through the stanza: read those last three lines by themselves and they seem to be talking about something much larger and more ominous than a potentially invasive backyard plant. In Mlinko’s universe, modest little things often symbolize vastness, and our local remarks, often uttered casually – We don’t have much time, there is still damage – often turn out to have applications far beyond their intended fields.

These cracked foundations, corrupted and undone by the incessant efforts of botanical life, can remind us of Venice, a city built on unstable and impermanent foundations, and thus give us a clue to the title of the book. Venice, increasingly prone to storms and floods, and devastated by the floods of tourists – tourists drawn by the very beauty they are helping to destroy – seems to stand as a symbol of all that is precious and of anything that is threatened by, human life. In “Sleepwalking in Venice”, Mlinko seems to describe how, in the middle of her own visit to this city, she found herself slipping into unreality:

…I fought
the cold, green voice that declared

It was as if she had never been there. Yes ? Or is it that she left alone…
and I saw myself reflected nowhere,
deprived of some … vitamins …
like a vampire feeling his bones
who can’t find himself in a mirror…