In Stones Are the First to Rise, Buddha, a U.P.S. driver, and an old woman living in hill country shares space and time with stones and peas and war and climate change, plus explorations of childhood and becoming a particular person. Throughout many of his books, Giannini finds himself working with discrete sets of concerns over the course of months or years, concerns that nevertheless cohere as a single envisioning, a book, as the parts of the body cohere to make body. Antonio Porchia's well-known words are appropriate here: "I know what I have given you. I don't know what you have received." The book is now in your hands.
SAMPLE POEM:
Stones Are the First to Rise
The stones talk to each other, just as we do. . . .
- Katsumahtauta (U.S. West Coast tribal elder)
to anthropologist-linguist Jaime de Angulo
1.
Rain pushing the night down
through melting snow,
entering earth
and we felt safe enough
after the storm.
We stayed in the ground.
Night could then be turned over
in the morning. . .the dark clods
and puddles with clouds we didn't crush.
Night was coming up through the soil
and vanishing.
Among our kind, that same small stone
turning up, as it did every year,
always rising before us, blind eye
in the night of dirt. Filthy
with what it couldn't see,
as a child without a mirror can't see
its smeared face. Nothing Romantic
or playful. Nothing green. Ancient.
It seemed without knowledge
of what or why it was, surfacing
wet and splotchy, a single syllable: stone.
2.
-in late springA man began telling
the crushed stones
in the truck-bed
each had the right to remain
silent. Not one listened.
Then they were lifted
higher and higher,
dumped
loudly into their gray language,
their heaped syntax
(no one could decipher)
on the ground. 'One rake
deserves another, ' said a worker,
as she and co-worker began
spreading sentences of granite
until the whole story became clear:
the fresh path we could walk
listening to the small nouns,
the ancient ones, turning under our feet,
how they depend, as we all do,
on boundaries, boulders at the edge.
David Giannini's most recent full-length collections of poetry include Already Long Ago; The Dawn of Nothing Important; In a Moment We May Be Strangely Blended; Mahap; The Future Only Rattles When You Pick It Up; and Faces Somewhere Wild; He was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and The National Book Award. Porous Borders, a book of prose-poems, was published by Spuyten Duyvil Press in 2017.) Numerous chapbooks of his poems and prosepoems have been published by a variety of small presses through the years, and his poetry has been published in national and international magazines and anthologies. He received Massachusetts Artists Fellowship Awards; The Osa and Lee Mays Award For Poetry; an award for prose-poetry from the University of Florida; a Finalist Award from the Naugatuck Review, and a Finalist Award for the James Hearst Poetry Prize of The North American Poetry Review in 2021. He has been a gravedigger; beekeeper; taught at Williams College, The University of Massachusetts, and Berkshire Community College, and he taught preschoolers and high school students, among others. Giannini was the Lead Rehabilitation Counselor for Compass Center, which he co-founded as the first rehabilitation clubhouse for severely and chronically mentally ill adults in the northwest corner of Connecticut.
