The Angel Notebook
Author: Luciano Iacobelli
The Angel
Notebook is the remarkable debut of a poet who has
boldly left the beaten track of anecdotal realism for Expressionist
depths. This is really four books in one: each a distinctly
different virtuoso performance. The title section is a fantasia
on the phenomenology of angels: a broken cascade of evocative
flights toward, and visitations by, the Invisible that intersects
the known world. "The Stutter Notebook" dramatizes,
in ways that are at once playful and philosophically incisive,
the speech impediment not only as poignantly limiting affliction
but as dynamic metaphor of the nature and plight of language
itself. "From the Interior Castle"dares to explore
the life of the Spanish mystic St. Theresa in the first
person: in psycho-sexual terms, through a series of graphic
scenes. And then, "The Mercy of My Father's House"
confronts, with a sensibility both tragic and surrealistic,
the most emotion-charged portions of the author's own personal
history, involving family, lovers, and friends in the Little
Italy where he grew up.
The Angel
Notebook is a work as transcendent as its title suggests.
This book is a voyage into the realm where there is evidence
of things not seen, a world as it exists in those fleeting
glimpses just beyond the corners of our eyes.
~ Bruce Meyer
Luciano Iacobelli's poems,
much like the man, are brimming with life, humour and intelligence,
always eager to explore. Iacobelli never plays it safe but
loves to dance on the edge of possibilities.
~ Gianna Patriarca
This poet isn't like the others.
Leather-jacketed, slicing his own way through the prosaic
and dully obscure scrubland of Canadian verse with concise
strokes of his angel blade.
~ Jim Christy
Iacobelli has summoned up some
wonderful angels and angelic stutterers. These messengers
do not whisk out of this world but bear witness and ask
us to pay attention to "the kind of music the earth
makes."
~ Ricardo Sternberg
The world of Luciano Iacobelli’s
Angel Notebook is a place of loss, dreams, ghosts, and darkness,
countered by angels of “human resiliency” that
mitigate human suffering. Iacobelli's lyric, frequently
surreal meditations move us through encounters with family,
philosophers, friends, lovers, and childhood neighbourhoods,
reminding us of the ephemeral and unstable nature of memory.
Iacobelli is a poet who is an astute observer with a compassionate
voice. Deeply intimate and personal, yet universal, this
is an eloquent and long awaited first book.
~ Rishma Dunlop
