Driving West on the Pulaski Skyway

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Poetry. John Ortenzio Bargowski has caught the quintessential soul of the Italian-American experience in a New Jersey we will recognize. Here are the subjects, familiar yet freshly observed: the central importance of the family and the household gods, the echoes of the old Catholic rituals, a couple’s courage in dealing as they can with a daughter’s loss, the hundred daily blessings, things we take for granted or never see, until tragedy brings home to us the rock-hard sacredness of what we have: the evening light, the wren’s consoling song, the forlorn Schwinn bicycle in the driveway, the tumbler pigeons your father cared for, the desolation of the empty packing plant facing the Jersey meadowlands, the stark dignity of an ancient grandmother praying in Italian as the TV preacher seems to call to her, the white hair of your wife packing mud up around the roots of the cabbages as she has for decades. All this, and so much more, in lines which capture the New Jersey idiom as William Carlos Williams caught it, but softer this time round, with the winds of the Adriatic mingling with the colder North Atlantic.–Paul Mariani