NY State Poet Emeritus Publishes
New Poetry Collection
At 92, Joseph Tusiani continues to work wonders. In October
2015, Tusiani, a Professor Emeritus at Lehman College, was
honored for his lifetime achievement in the arts at the Lehman
College Foundation Awards dinner. Then in January, Governor
Andrew Cuomo named him the New York State Poet Laureate
Emeritus in honor of his literary corpus as an acclaimed poet,
translator, and novelist. Now, in April, Tusiani has published
A Clarion Call (Bordighera Press), a collection of sixty-eight poems
that he has penned, on a nearly daily basis, since suffering a
stroke in February 2014.
“To me, it is unquestionably
obvious that an educated
population is vital to the
nation’s economic and civic
wellbeing, and thus well
worth our collective support
and investment of precious
resources.”
– Dr. Ricardo R. Fernández
Born in San Marco in Lamis, Italy in 1924, Tusiani earned a
doctorate from the University of Naples in 1947, and that year
emigrated from Italy to the United States, settling in the Little Italy
section of his beloved Bronx. He taught at a number of colleges
before landing at Lehman College where he taught Dante and the
classics (see p. 24), before retiring in 1983.
In the nearly two and a half years since his fateful stroke, Tusiani
has written more than 600 poems in four languages: English
(the language of his adopted country); Italian (the language of
his native country); Latin (the mother tongue of Catholicism and
the Romance languages); and Gargano (the dialect of the Apulia
region of Italy, where he was born, and his first language). In A
Clarion Call, Tusiani writes about the new physical limitations he
must grapple with even as he contemplates his own mortality. His
new need for a cane is recorded in “Mother’s Day 2014” as he
NEW POEMS BY
Joseph Tusiani
NEW YORK STATE
POET LAUREATE EMERITUS
BORDIGHERA
Bordighera Press
VIA Folios 118
BN 978-1-59954-104-4
A Clarion Call
A Clarion Call
t omnia nota
nte creatast.
tore sensus
efero verba.
ax quoque vivo
spirans.
pibus altus,
sistens.
ndice lucis
oeta?
Joseph Tusiani
$16.00
ANI received his doces in 1947, the year in
urn to his home village
The Return,” which res Greenwood Prize. His
rnered numerous prizs (1955), Rosa rosarum
ina II (1998), Radìcitus
established him as the
BORDIGHERA PRESS
visits his mother’s grave in St. Raymond’s Cemetery, triggering a
childhood memory of young doctors suddenly strolling the piazza
of his hilltop Italian town with canes “to let all the people know
they had achieved well-earned importance in society.” In “The
Wounded Swallow,” he recalls another childhood memory when
a boy struck a bird with a slingshot: “she was flying low around
the church/a different sling has hit and wounded me/His name
is Fate, but I’ve forgiven him.” But throughout A Clarion Call, again
and again, Tusiani finds solace in both beauty and art, to which he
has dedicated his life. In “New York’s Botanical Garden,” a poem
he wrote about one of his favorite places in the Bronx: “...No words
are needed:/just walk around and let this very place/tell you what’s
necessary to replenish/your senses with new life and all your life/
with a transcending sigh of inner peace.”
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