Carmelo Militano

The Stone Mason's Notebook previousnext Ekstasis Editions

The Stone Mason’s Notebook is both a continuation and an expansion of Militano’s poetic awareness and voice. It is a restless voice that seeks to reveal, celebrate, and capture a complex consciousness rooted in personal history, Winnipeg, Calabria, classical myth and the flux and power of art, ‘its inarticulate purity.’ He is a poet who finds points on the spirit’s compass whether it be the erotic, loss, irreverence, or the quotidian; it is all here.

Carmelo Militano’s poems are like the “village fountain in the piazza” in one of the pieces in The Stone Mason’s Notebook, each an “eternal hour-glass / measuring time.” Lyrical, passionate, reflective, ironic, and wise, Militano is a “mason” of the intersections of time and eternity, where the bricks of experience are always falling in “inarticulate purity.” For him, “Truth,” as he imagines Modigliani might have put it, “is just another mask, flesh and light [his] true addictions”; romantic relationships are “unfinished temples.” We read The Stone Mason’s Notebook and witness a marvelously unique individual poetic awareness with origins in Calabria and a history in Winnipeg as it is framed and intensified by an engagement with classical myth, the intricacies of art, and a fully lived life. The collection is a memorable one, a triumph.
~ Russell Thornton, author of The One Hundred Lives, short-listed Griffin Prize, 2015

Militano’s poems are marvellous letters to the reader, wide-ranging, intimate, and written insidemyths, Calabrian fairy-tales, the snowy streets and stockyards of Winnipeg.
~ Mary Di Michele, author of The Montreal Book of the Dead

Carmelo Militano is a Winnipeg poet and novelist. He was born in the village of Cosoleto, Province Reggio di Calabria and immigrated to Canada with his parents at an early age. He is the winner of the 2004 F.G. Bressani award for poetry for Ariadne’s Thread. His novel Sebastiano’s Vine was short-listed for the Margaret Laurence fiction prize, 2014. Militano hosts a weekly poetry show –The P.I. New Poetry Show – where he interviews poets from across Canada.

ISBN 978-1-77171-160-9
Poetry
66 pages
6 x 9
$23.95
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