The Last Song of the World
Fasano
Reviewed by D’Angelo Nelson
Poet, soothsayer, and educator Joseph Fasano's The Last Song of the World, the eighth book in a collection of both poetry and fiction, is mythical and plunges us into darkness. Fasano guides us with a graceful and steady hand through our modern world delicately blending violence and catastrophe through allusion to myths, monsters, and heroes in a docupoetic mission. We bear witness to murder and hate, the conundrum of mortality, the mysteries of fatherhood, and the sometimes symbiotic connection between humans and the environment. Resting between all this, and situated between the myths, are poems about Mary Magdalene, Ash Wednesday, and Holy Saturday, underscoring a fascination with the divine and the mortals connected to them that run throughout the book. With his poems, Fasano’s voice sings out a light that helps us navigate the shadows of the world we live in.
How does Fasano manage such a Herculean task? He bewitches us, as would any muse, angel, or wiseman, with song. Not only is The Last Song of the World rife with allusion, but, as the title suggests, it is rife with music, so much so that each poem is like a sheet of notes composed into a symphony. A lulling quality permeates throughout the book, reminiscent of a father singing his child to sleep. A quality that leaves us in the liminal space of both the beautiful and the terrible while still reminding us that "Ruin. Is. Not. What's. Beautiful." It amazes me how a poem about a breakup text Fasano’s son received sings with all the same elegance, majesty and wisdom as an ekphrastic poem about watching a doe giving birth, a poem that lies just on the opposite page. Whether it’s a broken heart, or the labors of birth, we are reminded that there is new life waiting for us much of this book ask us to remember one burning question: “Do you have any idea, any,/ in your furies, how new life can begin?”
All of The Last Song of the World is a paradox. It dances the line between the father's tenderness and the observer's precision and grief, the struggle of being human alongside the grace and beauty of nature, and as I come away from this book, I do so with the reminder to enjoy the music. A reminder that poetry is all around us- that all the agonies and ruins that have made us are poetry, too. "The ruins of the dance are the dance." And “in the cargo of our own hearts/ is the one hymn, the one hymn/ of the living, that luminous music.” This is a book for those who like poetry, are new to it, or for those that just need a reminder of why they fell in love with it in the first place. The songs in this book reach out to Lorca and Joan of Arc; they invoke Orpheus, Penelope, and Eurydice. However, this book's true magnificence is how it reaches out to us. I come away from this book with a sort of cathartic glory that used to be reserved for the poetry of old. Fasano brings the Classic surging, singing, and dancing into the Modern. Its was released on November 5th from BOA Editions LTD.