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Rhode Island Topics: Author Roberta Mudge Humble will be our quest and a little poetry too !
E-Mail the show at waynewnri@yahoo.com
The central theme of Wind in the Cave is essentially homosexual love affairs. From my perspective it would seem that Nicola does not know the difference between the word love and the word lust, as ‘Love’ propels him from one passionate encounter to another. But if one is not put off by the subject matter, Nicola produces some extraordinary poems of vibrant power. For example, his villanelle ‘The river’s frozen solid’ is so ingenious: its syntax is so flexible, its rhyming effortless, and there is a startling conceit in the last line with the word ‘alive’. A masterful performance. In fact, tight structures bring out the best of Nicola: his villanelle, ‘Achilles’, is also skilful and classical to boot. And there is everywhere evident what I would call technical excellence: he uses rhythm, rhyme, assonance, allusion to stunning effect. Also, he can find just the right word: for example, in ‘Cavern’ we encounter ‘the carapacial heart’—love that word, carapacial (notice an almost subliminal, unstated rhyme with ‘glacial’)! But if his diction can be precisely right, so too can his phrases and clauses—he has a knack for coining great one-liners: ‘the snakes of guile invisible to him’ (from ‘Boxes’) or ‘suffering the lightning and enlightening / of breaths intermingled on the verge of touch
’ (from a‘Dagger’).Source: Review by James Sale
’ (from a‘Dagger’).Source: Review by James Sale
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