Materfamilias by Ann LoLordo

 

There is much that is moving in Ann LoLordo’s chapbook Materfamilias. “Home is where we found her,” the poet writes with her succinct journalist’s eye in the opening verse about her late mother. Indeed, as Donald Winnicott has taught us, the bond is unbreakable; neither child nor mother exists without the other. LoLordo depicts the chain of women in her Italian immigrant family with facts and imagination, each generation awarded more choices. Or so it seems. But there is much that each does not know of the other, she cautions. Still, there is nowhere in the poet’s sketchbook that maternal memory fails to enter. Home gardens, drawing class, visits to Europe. And midway through the book, in the title poem, a revelation: how mothers/we speak in metaphor rather than reveal ourselves directly:

 

Instead, you speak of birds:

 

sparrows nesting in ancestral trees,

 

the collared dove beating her wings, 

 

the croak of the raven, mating for life.

 

It is/was once a truism that we don’t know what we think until we write it down. The bracing effect of these touching poems may be the inspiration to write about our own lineage and discover ourselves.

–Lisa Katz, translator of So Many Things are Yours, The Absolute Reader, Late Beauty, Approaching You in English and Look There.

 

Poet Ann LoLordo explores the rich realm of maternal bonds and the ways our matriarchal lineage supports and shapes us. Each poem in this lovely chapbook is a psychologically insightful and verbally skilled gem. We catch memorable glimpses of lace-making widows, couture-clad mothers, bird-watching grandmothers. The poems are deft, crafted with a light touch that captures the ongoing spell of ancestral memory.  In Materfamilias, the women who came before us are brought to life even after death and unfinished conversations.  LoLordo is a welcome new feminine voice in American poetry.

–Donna Baier Stein is an award-winning writer and publisher of Tiferet Journal.

 

In her artistry and authenticity, Ann LoLordo shows us mastery of the life lesson she longed to learn from her mother:  how “to captivate and stay true.”

—Sandy Jackson Cohen is a portrait artist and poet. Her poetry appears in the anthologies:  The Song in the Room – Six Women Poets; and Still Singing.