As appeared in: Lawrence Journal World: Arts & Entertainment

Ties that bind :

Lawrence poet's collection reads like familiar family history

By Mindie Paget,
Journal-World Arts Editor
Sunday, February 22, 2004

Reading Ed Tato's first collection of poetry is like flipping through a family album, recalling reunions, special occasions and the day-to-day idiosyncrasies of the most familiar -- sometimes most eccentric -- characters in our lives.

"True Stories from la Cosa Nostra" (Unholy Day Press, $10) tip-toes with bright, precise language through the lives of the extended Del Gabbo clan, an Italian immigrant family living in Brooklyn, N.Y. "La Cosa Nostra" translates to "this thing of ours" or "our thing" and is often used as a reference to the Mafia. Tato explains that in his collection, the phrase takes on a more dynamic meaning. "The parallel to the Mafia is that once you're in, you're never out. That's how your family is," he says. "No matter what you do or where you go, you're still part of the family. That might be a good thing; that might be a bad thing."

Crazy men, widowed women

The collection begins with a fictional family tree and then introduces the family's youngest son, the very observant Pico Ripreso, in the first poem. He narrates all 13 pieces, each named for a family member. One poem layers upon the next, building a candid written history of fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles, sons and daughters.

We meet Pico's grandfather, Umberto, "a crazy old man" who buries railroad spikes in his back yard and tracks their positions in a ledger; Uncle Pico, a quiet mandolin player, who passes down family history in song lyrics and carefully labeled photo albums; and Pico's suck-up brother Zupresi, who helps with weekly shopping, clips coupons and compliments church and neighborhood ladies' shoes.

Thad Allender/Journal-World PhotoLawrence poet Ed Tato has just published his first book of poems, "True Stories from la Cosa Nostra." Tato is pictured Tuesday in the parking garage near Ninth and New Hampshire streets.

There's Pico's slightly timid, always fretting Uncle Ugo, who carries on a relationship with a neighbor named Tracy. Tato elegantly describes their tango sessions:

"Uncle Ugo led,
moving like hot coffee stirred bedside
on a brilliant Sunday morning in May;
Tracy followed like cream in the wake of the spoon."

Pico's Aunt Lina has to put off romantic activities like dancing until she's well into her 30s. Her story, which seems entirely tragic at first, turns into a muted celebration of independence as a string of husbands -- who all happen to be brothers -- die successive grisly yet silly deaths, leaving Lina alone with two sons.

Ed Tato reads a selection from his book "True Stories from la Cosa Nostra": "Umberto"

But "Aunt Lina bought a car at thirty-five,
when the boys left home for the army.
she drank martinis with women in fur
and flirted with men
who dressed like the great DiMaggio and Sinatra;
she learned to play the harmonica."

Comic, mass appeal

Humor arises naturally out of the hum-drum of the Del Gabbo's lives. One of the funniest moments is the "apocalyptic licking" Pico suffers when his staunch Catholic grandmother Sophia catches him playing poker with funeral cards.

"Part of the impetus for the book is too many family poems are these grand emotional tributes to these people we live with, and there's so much more to characters than just the crusty old grandpa," Tato explains. "In this book the grandmother cooks, but she also beats the boys with everything at hand. It's a complex dynamic."

Tato's day job is selling real estate for Reece & Nichols. He's also president of the East Lawrence Neighborhood Assn. He does most of his writing at home, but he can often be found hanging out at the Bourgeois Pig or the Replay Lounge.

The poems in "True Stories" deviate a bit from his typical style, he says, reading almost like super-short narrative stories instead of poems. Other examples of his work push the narrative to the background and reveal it in small increments, discrete moments that don't necessarily tie together in clear ways.

"I was hoping that it ('True Stories') would appeal to people who would never pick up a book of poems," he says. "But I think they really are poems. I think making them longer would lose a whole lot."

Tender ties that bind

Although Tato grew up in Buffalo, N.Y., he says the Del Gabbos don't reflect his own Italian family history. "Some of the incidents have occurred, I guess," he says. "The point was to try to make the dynamics and the relationships true, not necessarily the incidents that occur."

Throughout the book, original photographs by Lawrence photographer Jeff Barnett-Winsby illustrate Tato's poems. The black-and-white shots show details, never complete scenes, and in that way complement the poetic windows Tato opens onto the Del Gabbo clan. Each poem stands alone as a character study, but taken as a whole, the collection has the magnetic effect of luring the reader back to its pages to tie together the strange, funny, tender strands that bind this family together.

Copyright © 2003

Tato Review: by Jason Ryberg

A grand matriarch who rules with a mean stink-eye and a quick mop handle, a crazy old man who's buries a railroad spike in his yard every week for his fifty-three years, a smooth, shark-skinned Lothario whose life is meticulously arranged by "houndstooth, tweed and gabardine," a wandering hipster-hobo-bard that drifts in and out of the family: These are just some of the members of the Del Gabbo clan.

Set in Niagara Falls, NY Ed Tato's latest collection of poems, True Stories from la Cosa Nostra (Unholy Day Press) tells a loosely woven story that spans thirty years and winds through thirteen family members. The term "la Cosa Nostra", long-associated with the mafia literally translates as "this thing of ours." A cultural reference to the family as close-nit, extended clan.

Like William Kennedy's Phelans or Puzo's Corleone (though slightly more comic and benign), Tato has given us an all-American immigrant family in the throws of cultural assimilation. The Del Gabbos come complete with family tree, an intricate mythos and the obligatory rainbow variety of dysfunctions. It might be an overly bold statement, but never has a book of poetry, except perhaps for Master's "Spoon River Anthology" been so ripe for translation to the screen.

It has been proposed that sometimes the proper criticism of art is cross disciplinary - where the most insightful praise for a movie may be to wonder what kind of poem it would make, or what kind of painting a song would make, etc. Whether or not this is appropriate praise, it is at least testimony to Tato's yarn-spinning that half way through the book one wants to begin casting calls.

One of the guilty pleasures of True Stories is the charming, inviting and intriguing qualities of these stories. Despite the conflict, the dysfunction, the final, tragic disappointment with the family (the idea of family); one still can't help wanting to join the Del Gabbos, to dodge a backhand at Sunday dinner, to go to the tracks with Aldo, to lob rotten pares at priests with Umberto, to sit on the front porch with the men, smoking cigarettes and drinking homemade wine, to listen in on what the women are saying in some other part of the house.

One of the more glaring aspects of the majority of Tato's generation of poets (and going as far back to the academy's retaking of the spotlight from the beats in the early '70's) is its near-absolute aversion to raw humor, horror, tragedy, adventure, intrigue; in short, to the idea that art must first engage and entertain before it can enlighten. The back-side blurbs of modern poetry collections are useless to the casual (though committed) reader and are usually inaccurate, inane and inflated as a museum placard. Maybe this is so because the average collection of poems by today's gentleman-scholar-poets is never really, truly lyrical or visceral or titillating or knee-slappingly hilarious.

Modern poets seem to consider the impulse to excite and ensnare the reader base, even when used decisively, sparingly, tastefuly. Tato, however, manages to weave the highbrow and the lowbrow seamlessly, and with a modernist finesse to boot. His rhythmic style is wry, blunt and staccato, a Spartan feather-weight, all bone, muscle and tendon, still fresh into the twelfth round. In "Pico Represo" his rapid-fire tragi-comedy effortlessly blends the heartbreaking with the ludicrous:

"I weighed slightly more
than the submarine sandwich
I brought with me at birth.

It was pastrami
From Avenue Subs on Elmwood,
And prompted my Uncle Aldo
To nickname me the little Jewboy."

From "Uncle Aldo"

"one night, Uncle Aldo left his fedora at the bar,
when he went to get it,
a milk truck clipped him
plunging a rib into his lung.

As the doctors scrubbed for surgery,
Uncle Aldo asked about the hat
And the daily double at Buffalo Raceway."

These poems are not finely spun glass. This is not a dusty collection of bloodless porcelain dolls. This is not a set of expensive decorative hand-towels. This is poetry with pathos and idiom, poetry with a distinct personality and a common healthy funk to it. Tato shows us that poetry should bray a little, that poetry should strut and talk a little shit from time to time, that poetry should throw off a little of the human heat and sweaty stink that lives somewhere between finishing off a twelve hour day in the sun with your buddies and fucking your lover stupid on a Sunday morning.

Ultimately, what Tato has done with True Stories is to began with a collection of memoirs, notes-to-self, obituaries, family photos and secret family recipes, and work backward, whittling away the flab. Instead of building up the bulk, he leaves us with lean, stripped-down poems that wink and tell you exactly what a semi-reluctant member of a family thinks you need to know.