Minor Loss of Fidelity by Peter Caccavari

Peter Caccavari’s first book of poetry is a testament to resisting despair, how to live with, how to come to love, loss of life, the losses of the body. In these poems there is comfort in the everyday and, more important, in the natural world where there are always reminders, always remainders, of what has almost—but not quite—disappeared. Caccavari’s primary trope for this interplay of appearance and disappearance is the voice and the nonvoice:  “the unvoiced is voiced/ and heralds come to us/ from the most unlikely places.” Attending to the details demands a sensibility seasoned by the hard facts of living since “…love is stern/ As death, that death whispers love’s calumny.”  Thus, loss is a kind of gain, a difficult lesson to accept until “we have the strength to be/ That weak.” A Minor Loss of Fidelity is a gesture toward, an attempt at, restoration and these poems trace that process with clear-headed, open-eyed, trepidation and wonder.

–Tyrone Williams

Sweet and elegant, wry and inquisitive, the poems of Peter Caccavari prove formally rigorous and informally dazzling. Whether writing about the cosmos or the supermarket, COVID-19 or Jupiter, Caccavari offers us solace lined with skepticism—or maybe skepticism lined with solace?—our lives together in this earth-bound moment his deepest subject. In a crown of sonnets, terza rima, a villanelle, and buckets full of free verse, Minor Loss of Fidelity makes us all better, not a curative but a reckoning.

–Alan Michael Parker