All the Eyes that I Have Opened, winner of both the Europa in Versi Prize and the San Vito al Tagliamento Prize, is Franca Mancinelli’s fourth book translated into English by John Taylor, this one in bilingual format from Black Square Editions. Its eight sequences of verse and poetic prose range in theme from the sufferings of migrants to photography, the natural world, and St. Lucia. However, they are broadly and internally connected by a psychological link between wound and perception, stated succinctly through the perspective of a tree considering shorn branches: “all the eyes that I have opened / are the branches that I have lost” (italics original).
The link between wound or loss and a new aspect of perception is made succinctly in these retrospective lines, but in lived experience the process takes time. Somewhat paradoxically, perhaps, it also results from ongoing vision and consciousness, both self-reflective and witnessing, of the eyes that are already open. Mancinelli speaks specifically of this aspect of the work in an interview with her English translator John Taylor:
“I try to create a space where meaning can emerge by taking form in a sequence of texts and by transmigrating into subsequent sequences. This meaning is a fragmented trail that runs through the whole book beyond changes in space-time and in the subject who speaks, be it human or from the plant world (as in the sequence “Master Trees”), or belonging to ancient votive statuettes, to a protective presence of light (as in the poems evoking Saint Lucy), to an encamped migrant, or to a woman in her liminal daily life. As the epigraph — “cannot scatter itself / puts itself back together at every turn [. . .]” — suggests, the presence that gives voice to the book resembles the open plurality of birds in a “flock flying onwards.”
Consciousness in the text is thus presented as decentralized and fluid in both the “eyes that I have opened” and the “flock flying onwards” metaphors. This flexibility, crucial to the “opening of eyes” in loss, mirrors the text’s construction as a “space where meaning can emerge by taking form in a sequence.” Note the priority given to the space that allows the sequences to emerge. Mancinelli has similarly invoked this aspect of her process and presentation of poems in discussing blank pages in another interview with Taylor:
“The blank pages give a rhythm to my books. They mark the rhythm of vision and breathing. As in any journey, we need a place to halt, to let what has entered our gaze, our listening, settle in. In this blank space, the life of anyone passing through the pages has the possibility of encountering the life that I have tried to translate into words. To me, a book without blank pages seems a deaf monologue, a house built for nobody: dark and without windows.” [i]
This discussion of the space opened in her work for the reader’s own experience sounds a lot like the discussion of her creative process in the first quote. These parallels inform my reading of the book as one that sees as integral such movements of consciousness between poet, subject-perspectives, and reader, in the same way that Mancinelli describes such movements taking place between the different perspectives within the text. My point is that, in addition to the quality of the individual pieces, we are invited into a second, even more compelling experience as readers in following both their sequencing and the situating of the sequences themselves in a space that only appears to us when we cease our focus on any one poem. Space, appropriately the most foundational formal feature of the collection, is also the most necessary aspect of its subject, the process of new “eyes” opening within consciousness. Likewise, the sequences present the ongoing and continually renewed archetypal process of eyes opening from lost branches in time, structuring the reader’s experience so as to recreate space for both witnessing and silence within them.
Mancinelli offers a present description of the transpersonal opening process that corresponds with the retrospective one above: “My body has an open texture from which hangs a thread. Someone at the other end, without even noticing, pulls it, and slowly I grow thin.” The speaker’s initial openness, again a form of space, allows a kenosis of presence to the other to take place: Self-focus intuitively “grow[s] thin” as compassionate perception is offered to an other, expanding consciousness by opening a new eye. These two interconnected images provide a foundational understanding of the processes that underlie many movements in the collection that vary dramatically on the surface.
Another passage integrates the reader into the process: “The ravens have come to leave you with a lesson. The most difficult one. Those black fruits on the branches, that unexpected presence. And suddenly the detachment, the emptiness that comes back clearly. You call it abandonment, try to recognize it as a restitution” (italics original). When the speaker – and reader – see themselves as fluid movements of interdependent perceptions within consciousness, each ending constitutes the return of another; therefore, there is no need to fear such movements, though they each involve different kinds of pain.
This awareness of interconnectedness is woven through different aspects and contexts of the human and natural worlds. A sequence in “Jungle” includes the mortal awareness that accompanies the witnessing perception:
the morning is a nail
once the mind is pierced
emerges an image
as if from rotten fruit
swarming formless life
comes back in tiny signs.
Recalling the comparison of the birds to fruit, “rotten fruit” may reference a corpse, the interpretation of images related to seeking “tiny signs” in the maggots. Accordingly, the experience feels sorrowful, precisely in that it is grounded in mortal reality. Pain and death, however, are also what we have as common ground; their context, in part, allows an “image” to bear “tiny signs” intuitively comprehensible by a mortal other. This basis of connection allows the speaker to write complex, interconnected images for a reader:
turned into graphite the eye
stares at the nebula
of points that we are.
The “nebula” and “swarming formless life” are both images of unformed material the poet will attempt to make into something in which the reader may perceive themselves. The primary difference, accounting for the beauty of one and discomfort evoked by the other, is distance, another indication of the importance of movement within psychic space to both the book’s structure and the practices of psychological flexibility it presents. The result, of course, is a change in the readers’ perspectives in relationship to such images, allowing us to see them from multiple points of view, at various removes.
This process mirrors, to some degree, that of “walking around” dreams, in which the interiority of the individual overlaps with the archetypal, also offering “tiny signs” of connection:
passing through the earth
in sleep we keep going down
in circles between organs and planets.
Also as it might in a dream, this leaving of the self is realized in perceiving the world through the perspective of an other we also are: “we awake inside a bird’s eyes.” Of course, this could be construed as abandonment from the ego perspective; however, the speaker experiences this compassionate imagination as a paradoxical homing, “including us like an island / from which we were not born.” Importantly, this stage includes “fruit sliced / at breakfast, the cup’s circle / a mirror,” showing again how the “fruit” image changes metaphorical implications as the meditation – or creative process – shifts context. The circle is, then, a nod to the deeper truth of consciousness that each end is a beginning.
A central – and integral – strength of the sequences is Mancinelli’s ability to capture unique, momentary constellations of feeling and thought in phrase and image – thereby leaving between each two sequenced poems an experientially unique gap for the reader themselves to undertake their part of the consciousness making. This process is at the heart of “Master Trees,” where we are confronted with a short poem evoking the breaking of a branch, the opening of an eye:
things that have been alive
make a sharp crack.
The austere lines leave us room to associate breaking limbs of our own with those of the tree, and then space to meditate on aspects of such breaking – the shock, the pain, the sudden alteration of life – as immediate realities, without the consolations of narrative.
In the next piece, time has passed, but, more importantly, perspective has had time to deepen through the opening of a new eye: “when you see again, you’ll find everything supported by branches. Nothing has happened. We’re here on this framework of leaves” (59). The second person here connects the reader with the tree while also creating the image of branches holding up leaves – and, within the image, also the sky. The shifting perspectives remind us not only of the ephemerality of perspective; the meditative witnessing also evokes the separateness and overlap of the speaker’s, the imagined tree’s, and the reader’s perspectives. The following poem, then, includes this movement among perspectives itself:
I’ve seen the eyes of the trees
within the thicket a jolt
of glimmer left — to watch over us
like heavy rain waiting.
Over the course of the three poems, we have moved from a traumatic incident, to already having been healed, to this perspective that seems to foresee the next “jolt,” which will be both another loss and “glimmer,” necessary as rain.
From this circle, the speaker embraces her own growth in imaginative symbiosis with the tree:
I branch out according to the light
master trees
to open my chest wide
with the strength that comes from a seed.
In contrast to the “sharp crack,” the opening of the chest involves physical growth for the tree and represents a breath for humans, another interesting overlap with distinction between the speaker and the sympathetically imagined tree. Humans and trees breathe interdependently, after all; in such shared breathing we see another parallel with the inspirations and expirations of text and space within the sequences – as well as their breathing being shared between the poet, subject-perspectives, and readers.
Attention moves through the body to the air taken in by the breath: “the air was inert, traversed by trembling and quivering. It needed to withdraw, to set life aside, to push it towards areas where pockets of quietness opened. I thus grew in this maimed form. You can see in me how the nearby street burns” (65). Again, focus shifts so that we see through the “trembling and quivering” of the scenes we have been attached to – into the experience of air wanting its own change of perspective, which it finds, as has the speaker, within the other.
The final leap from the “maimed form” of the tree – and of perception itself – to inviting the reader to see the burning street “in” the speaker is another example of the recurrent shifting between speaker, subject-perspective, and reader, in which each may serve as interdependent context – or audience – for any other.
“Darkroom” provides an excellent embodiment of these dynamics. A second person that could be either a reader or another person, blurs the parameters and context of the developing photograph:
in the first sequences, you laughed and talked into my ear. You
didn’t know you were inside the framing of the photo.
The following section seemingly compresses time; the second person already deceased:
at this distance I can keep you in focus. You stand still, as in the first
moments. Your ashes carried by the wind, into my darkroom.
On one level, the darkroom represents the layers of meta-perception through which we glimpse consciousness per se: not able to transcend time, yet capable of seeing it as a function of perspective, of lens and shutter, in negatives. The darkroom “eye” sees the subject of the camera eye, but also what the viewer of the photo will see – and the distance between the two. These shifts in perspective are very similar to those the gaps between sections facilitate.
Interestingly, this multi-dimensional understanding seems to overwhelm the speaker’s own “thin” self-understanding at this point in the sequence, and the next section reaches out to the reader, appropriately in a religious echo, a language that contextualizes the individual:
the room squeezes like a hand
crumbling two bits of bread
body and blood of no one
do this in forgetfulness
of yourselves mere remains
to be swept away
It is essential that readers feel the speaker’s self-offering of emptiness, of “growing thin,” through this inverted Christological allusion. This shared emptiness, in turn, alters the perspective of the following section, the reader now present in the interiority of the speaker as a co-creator of our shared emptiness:
in me now you write in white ink
of this nothing brought to completion:
The shift between this section and the next is denoted by a swath of white space, not an asterisk, enacting the space written by the reader, opened within the speaker, in which the speaker’s words are contained. Here, the subject of the writing, momentarily, is the writing itself. We shift again in the next section to invoke the once-again independent reader, now separated from the inner reader by simile:
these cartilage pages
are the skeleton in which you roam
like a shadow of blood.
The interiorizing movement ends by invoking its opposite into being: “today has emerged from my waters” (177). The speaker’s witnessing of her own “thin” inner reader grows, in another illustration of a wound becoming a perception, into an attention to the outer world.
The reader’s inhabiting of the silence between poems, between moments and modes of perception, completes both the spaces within sequences, as well as those between the sections’ larger shifts of theme or context. The understanding of perception as a wound implies a conjunction of healing and reflection within consciousness that can only take place in a soul-deepening process in time that the book recreates in these gaps. After all, we notice throughout that the continual disconnections from subjects are the movements by which they are allowed to be perceived at all. It is a complex moral and epistemological vision and in no way a gloss for the inflicting of harm. Rather, the severing wound, independent of cause, may function – as it does throughout the book – as a transpersonal source of insight, connectedness and compassion for those who open it, open to it.
[Published by Black Square Editions on August 15, 2023, 200 pages, $25.00 US paperback]
[i] The quoted passage appears in a dialogue with John Taylor in Eurolitkrant. The original interview on Trafika Europe Radio broadcast is available here: https://omny.fm/shows/trafika-europe-radio/franca-mancinelli-the-butterfly-cemetery?in_playlist=trafika-europe-radio!bowery-poetry-speaks