Perhaps Fly

Poetry. "Al Tacconelli's PERHAPS FLY draws us into the complex and deeply-felt inner world of the author—a Proustian journey across a lifetime—and, like Proust's prose masterpiece, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, it is both a superb rendering of Remembrance of Things Past and In Search of Lost Time. Both translations apply to this, by turns mournful and exuberant, memorial and celebration of actual experience and meditation on ancestral and generational links we feel but cannot know. Visits to and from his mother's extended Poughkeepsie clan are happy excursions happy moments that stand in contrast to the household hundreds of miles away. The book is a life-affirming and death-riddled account of a childhood, adolescence, and adulthood of rich memory and devastating loss. Vivid descriptions abound, so we participate with Ma in whipping up the morning eggnog and accompany Nonna as she bathes her St. Joseph's Day Eggs in a lusty tomato sauce. We feel the ancestral presence in the wine cellar, where 'the faintest fragrance still lingers, Gone now the wine makers slowly becoming more forgotten.' The book is honest, wise, and will haunt the reader long after it is put down. The poet says 'I choose to remain silent,' but the reader will be grateful the author defied the 'peasant's aged finger against my lips,' and decided to speak."—Diana Cavallo