Eye to Eye

Poetry. Italian American Studies. Women's Studies. Maria Terrone's poems are simultaneously sensuous and spiritual, earthy and intellectual. Her imagination takes fire from contradiction and complexity. One small image--washing a potato or rearranging a lingerie drawer--can open up vistas of private desire or public history. Her poetry explores the contingencies of time and eternity, the mysterious interpenetration of reality and the imagination.--Dana Gioia

As alert to the edgy political nature of contemporary reality ('the names of nations changing/ as people revolt and take aim') as they are to the luminous energies of ordinary facts, or the hard truths of the body's own shocking vulnerability, or the complicated inheritance drawn from her beloved Italian ancestry, Maria Terrone's poems see 'eye to eye' with a world she can at once celebrate and grieve over, but for which she shows a deep, empathetic, richly articulate understanding. Thoughtful, grounded, even visionary at times, her language in this mature third collection is a kinetic mix of keen-eyed observation and unsentimental judgment. In one poem she sees 'gnarled hawthorn trees that lean/towards me like question marks.' As a poet she lives, like the rest of us, in a world of questions marks--but what shines through them is the fierce light of the life force itself, telling her 'it's possible for a body to float on joy.'--Eamon Grennan

Maria Terrone's eyes and ears are honey, and her touch is 'near enough to lift each hair on my skin.' Through trauma and joy her nuanced and evocative poems are insistent and alive. Terrone pinpoints unforgettable moments and we can feel the shock of discovery as she enacts how 'to suspend your life for another.'--Annie Marie Macari