If We Still Lived Where I was Born by Maria Giura -- BOOK REVIEW

BOOK REVIEW

If We Still Lived Where I was Born by Maria Giura

I try to read poetry every morning, but I am no student of the genre. I don’t know what makes a poem a “good” poem or what I should look for in poetry to judge its merit. I feel a little intimidated by poetry. This all makes it difficult for me to review books of poems and I usually avoid doing so. But I thought Maria Giura’s memoir, Celibate, was fascinating and well-written, so I was willing to read and review her new poetry collection, If We till Lived Where I was Born.

I’m glad I did. Giura’s poems are accessible, evocative, and interesting. They read like little stories, mostly about her life with her extended Italian-American family. They are thoughtful in tone but never maudlin. The way they focus on everyday matters stirs up similar memories that make them easy to relate to. One called “December 8” I particularly liked and, since today is December 8, it is the perfect one to share:

Our mother always waited until
the Immaculate Conception,
before she decorated.

She pulled out
garland and lights
and the gold, antique fruit,

danced the Christmas tree
into its red-bowl stand.

She sprayed the windows
with snow
and belted
Christmas Card to You
with my sisters and me.

She tied the mistletoe
and spread the tablecloths,
hand made ornaments she hung with satin string.

Outside she wrapped lights
around both sides of our house,
fixed colored bulbs into the Holy Family
except for Jesus dim in His hay.

She baked and shopped, wrapped and cooked,
poured herself out.

In other homes, Christmas started
the day after Thanksgiving,
but we waited.

How could the Savior of the world be born
without his mother,

how could I have learned
to cherish my faith
without mine?

If We Still Lived Where I was Born is a collection of poems that can be appreciated and enjoyed by poetry connoisseurs and readers like me who shy away from poetry. I highly recommend Giura’s new book.

NOTE

I first "met" Maria in 2019 when she published Celibate, a memoir about falling in love with a Catholic priest. Read my review of Celibate here and my 2019 interview with Maria here.

FROM THE PUBLISHER’S DESCRIPTION

In Maria Giura's If We Still Lived Where I Was Born, the narrator unlocks the meaning she's made of her childhood and heritage, spirituality and lost loves and draws the reader in to retrieve their own. The collection begins in the apartment above her parents' Brooklyn pastry shoppe where she imagines them still fighting, still making us, still together, then shifts to adulthood where she learns to stay still long enough to listen for the story, and then returns to childhood where her mother and aunts teach their kids to spread out their blankets and live. Moving between New York and Italy, between family and "stranger," these poems show longing and vulnerability, but also the thrill of being young and part of something larger than oneself, of making peace, and pursuing the path you were meant to. They brim with the people and places that have taught her the most and ring with pathos and celebration, from her immigrant father waiting for her on the corner . . . bread in his hand to the sister who pulled the music out of her, helped her make her own song. Beginning with a journey to a literal birth place and extending outward to many figurative places of self-discovery, this collection explores what lasts when all else passes away.