“Stones Are The First To Rise”
Author: David Giannini
Publisher: Dos Madres Press INC.
Publication Date: 2025
In this latest volume of poetry by David Giannini, “Stones Are The First To Rise,” the tone in every poem and in the closely fitting entire volume, comes like songs on the breezes of the various seasons, where we are blessed by a genuine and believable optimism once again. The location of these days, weeks, months, seasons, moments, and memories of life effortlessly embody a poetry that embraces a loosening of time and space in order that all things may find the connection we all intuitively know exists.
In reading “Ground Elder (Bishop’s Weed)” we are tossed into the innocence of being. Note the inventive, easy mystery in lines from each of the four sections:
1. Fall: “I gawk at the patch of Bishop’s Weed, then slaughter this invasive with a weed whacker…” then knowing it will be back in spring. 2. Winter: A world in torpor but the birds sing their warmth and the cold humans think of the rocks as unknowing yet, “we sense their well-being with each other.” 3. After Months: “clouds open their rehearsals,/day spends itself polishing its outcome: the festival of sunset” 4. Now: With a rewarding reference to the first section, “love happens outside of time/noninvasive/roots routed partially underground.” This is the amazing style of work Giannini has put together in this magical collection that really helps us see the wonder and metaphysical nature of all things and people.
These poems create a very real sense of disembodied reality of the material and immaterial. There is a recognition of the spirit of things animate and inanimate. In the poem, “16 Inversions,” we are reminded that things of the world and in ourselves are one as the other in the lines arranged ingeniously as lists for ease: The horseshoe waits for the horse.
The base of the fencepost feels the most weather.
There is hidden effort even in stones.
The boulder finally becomes Sisyphus.
Dreams take down their ears before they listen.
Hearing an image means it discovered you.
And …
Our joys attend the anguished yowling beneath all things.
…
The book cover deserves honorable mention because it is exquisite on its own but more importantly it represents the poetry in this book with startling accuracy and grace. It reproduces a painting by Berkshire artist Sean McCusker and Giannini says, “it is perfect for my book, and of course it ties in with the title poem.”
The poems in this volume, found in the many places and times of our experience, the many perspectives on being, relate to each other from all angles, making connections and, most importantly, provide a resolution, a sense of balance and perhaps otherworldly knowledge. In other words, this collection reassures and encourages with a tone of confidence in the nature of well-being. Giannini also said a well-known jazz musician and, and on a separate occasion, a jazz aficionado, unknown to each other, recently compared the sounds and rhythms of Giannini’s work to jazz “coloratura” and rhythms, not as the Beat poets used jazz and bebop, but in the poet’s original way. Giannini informed me he was completely unaware of such takes on his work but found these comments gratifying. Giannini states this book, “with many poems speaking back and forth to each other, but in different sections, may also be viewed as a way of working serially toward an overall envisioning.” A peaceful space if you will, embracing a oneness with the universe and each other.
A book event is being planned at The Bookstore & Get Lit Wine Bar in Lenox at a time and date to be determined.
