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This is not a review, but a reflection and impression of this new poetry collection by Lynne Viti.

The collection is titled Dancing at Lake Montebello. Viti, who lectured at Wellesley College for many years (and I had the pleasure to read with at a Sam Cornish tribute reading at the New England Book Fair), has penned a collection that has much to recommend it.

I have always followed the dictum of William Carlos Williams, “No ideas but in things.” And Viti has certainly learned the good doctor’s lessons. Her poems are a cornucopia of images – no concept is left floating in the atmosphere but is attached to something that is tangible – we can taste, hear, feel it – smell it.

Dancing at Lake Montebello: Poems by Lynne Viti (Apprentice House Press)

In one poem, Charm City, the poet writes about her native city of Baltimore (methinks) and traces its transformation with a gimlet eye. She writes of her youth during the 60s, and all the totems of the times, ” …watched foreign films with subtitles, learned to roll joints … The posh steak houses grew tired and empty/ as their patrons/ died off,/ too old to travel, began to lose their teeth.” I consider myself a student of gentrification, of the change, loss, and rebirth of cities, so I could appreciate this.

Viti writes evocatively about a whole range of things from the Civil Rights Movement, the decline and death of friends, of meeting a young Sam Cornish in Baltimore, and is disarmingly honest about her bout with alcohol.

Viti is a scribe of the cycles of life, encapsulated in her own experience. I was touched by her poem Judgement that describes her experience with her mother when JFK was shot. It captures the intensity I also felt as a 9-year-old boy, when we swerved in the car, my mother crying from the news from the radio of the fatal shot. I can remember the long, solemn, black and white processionals across the TV screen, and the intimacy that tragedy can bring on.

I am pleased that I published some of Viti’s poems, and I think this book is a fine testament to her craft and more importantly her humanity.