~ by Carlo Matos

Salmon Press, forthcoming 2014

105 pages, €12

Millicent Borges Accardi is a Portuguese-American poet and the author of Injuring Eternity (World Nouveau) and Woman on a Shaky Bridge (Finishing Line Press).  She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the arts, the California Arts Council, the Barbara Deming Foundation, and CantoMundo, among others.  In her second full-length collection of poems, Only More So, Accardi plays her themes like a jazz musician. A theme is introduced and then abandoned.  A new theme makes itself felt and then slowly, cautiously—like the great jazz improvisers that are littered throughout the text: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman, Wes Montgomery—the first theme reappears, altered but recognizable, trilling towards the next image or, like all good music, towards the anxiety of silence.  Poetry and music, it goes without saying, have a way of approaching silence without ever reaching it, like Zeno’s paradox where the math approaches zero without ever really getting there.  And yet, somehow, despite the numbers—despite the silence—we still arrive at the finish line a little shocked and surprised to be there.

Only More So is a collection of lyric poems about jazz and sex, gender and marriage, the Holocaust and silence—music, violence, war, rape, and silence again.  Accardi weaves jazz imagery throughout the text.  Sometimes jazz is the theme itself, sometimes it is a bridge to a new theme, other times it is an echo in the clarinet section that threatens to develop then fades.  For example, in “For John, For Coltrane,” Accardi describes how the music used Coltrane’s body, aged him,

“made trying
harder than a man ought to into just
silence, made it seem just
for the silence of it all.” Continue reading →