Description
Book SynopsisAppearing on the first page of Dante Di Stefano’s
Midwhistle, a flock of blackbirds braids its way throughout this book-length poem. A sprawling, digressive love note to an unborn son, it is also a celebration of the life and legacy of poet William Heyen, a meditation on midlife, and an exploration of the fuel of poetry itself.
Trade ReviewMidwhistle proves Dante Di Stefano ‘a child / of cello, air, & mint spears.’ In this refulgent homage, Di Stefano honors ‘what loves / have been thrummed forth & nurtured / into shining’ by poet William Heyen’s august work and person. Surely any reader will leave this book, as I did, more alert and alive, more ‘in love / with the gray undersides of / mulberry leaves & the way / the grass ekes toward twilight." - H. L. Hix
"An epic masterpiece. A rare and seamless melding of literary forbearers in conversation with Di Stefano’s contemporary experience of being fully alive as a poet and human being trying to make sense of the world, yet once again. This book is akin to the essence of psalms: they sing to the glory of why poetry matters to us, one and all, across time." - Richard Blanco, 2013 presidential inaugural poet and author of
How to Love a CountryTable of Contents
- 1 i. (out of the azure)
- 2ii. (an Unyet just begun)
- 6iii. (interlude: elegy for Adam Zagajewski)
- 7iv. (this mattering of music)
- 10v. (soundtrack for a zombie apocalypse)
- 13vi. (interlude: to my wife)
- 14vii. (from aster)
- 16viii. (poetry, be my body of shining)
- 20ix. (a forty-three second freefall)
- 23x. (mellifluous blah-blah // time travel)
- 25xi. (interlude: on rereading Anne Carson’s Sappho)
- 26xii. (when asked to describe the self // Yojimbo // Ishmael)
- 29xiii. (skilled with moons)
- 30xiv. (playlist on repeat)
- 32xv. (little arks)
- 33xvi. (after Anthony Brunelli’s Depot at Dusk)
- 37xvii. (interlude: Darwin’s Arch)
- 38xviii. (bright signatory)
- 40xix. (the pomegranate’s hundred hundred hearts)
- 41xx. (interlude: elegy for Eavan Boland)
- 42xxi. (zero at the bone)
- 44xxii. (in the manner of Proust & Tolstoy)
- 45xxiii. (interlude: prayer for Gaza)
- 46 xiv. (gleaming // a kind of rising)
- 57envoi (a traveler’s prayer)
