LATE
Poems by Cecilia Woloch
Boa Editions ( Rochester, New York),2003
paperback 79 pages
$13.95

The phases and ages of Eros are the theme of Cecilia Woloch’s poetry collection Late
mixing traditional lyric forms with prose poems in flash fiction style, creating a poignant and passionate portrait of a woman’s inner world. Addressing the men in her life, Woloch speaks as daughter, young girl, bride, lover, wife, mother, teacher — in poems rich in evocative, erotic language tinged with desire, regret, and self-irony. The book opens with an “Aubade” offering a prayer for love... “ Oh world, hold us up to the light” — then moves through a succession of moods and styles mirroring the complexities of human relationships.
“Bare Back Pantoum” expresses the joyous physicality of a boy and girl riding bareback through a burning wood, with the rhythm, flare, and fire of the gypsy culture to which Woloch proudly traces her origins. “Custom” recreates the dizzy elation of being in love “ Some days you wake up and find god in your shoes and don’t know who put it there....And the windows, my god the windows have gathered absurd amounts of sky... “Hex” instead conveys the black bitter mood of a “wrong love” — “As if my heart, that box of shadows, could be locked against itself.” “Los Ninos” deals with a woman’s cautious appreciation of teenage vigor “At any moment they could strike the match of touch, they were that close” The ironic “1978" is the story of a youthful amour gone sour.

“That winter we were so broke
we siphoned gasoline from the other’s cars
lived on tea and cigarettes.
You let me wear the moth-eaten mink
your last lover, the stripper, had left behind.
(Or was she a fire-eater, that Rose, an exotic dancer
heading west and sure you would follow her?
You did)
.
Interwoven with these stories and lyrics are elegies for a father lost, among the most moving poems in the collection including “All Hallows,” “After World,” and the brilliant “ How It Works.”
Woloch’s intent is a whole portrait of a whole life, in which insignificant or even unseemly details ... the smell of piss in a Paris street ... find their place and add to the richness of all. This is the theme of “Filth” in praise of the soot, smoke, and dirt of Paris, a city Woloch knows well, of the worn interiors of its cafes and of the rumpled shirts of the waiter at “ Le Chien Qui Fume.”
Running through the collection is a thread of occult imagery....hexes, dreams, ghosts, wishes, omens, graves, signs, and pervasive images of fire... the underside of Eros where death and love are linked in a magic vision of the ties between bodies and things. Intense, darkly glinting, and sensual, Late celebrates the body of love in its many forms

Late may be ordered from www.boaeditions.org
Cecilia Woloch has a long experience as a teacher of creative writing in varied public institutions in the US and Europe. She currently organizes poetry workshops in Paris.
She may be contacted through her website www.ceciliawoloch.com
Centro Pokkoli will be organizing a workshop with Woloch in Vitorchiano, Italy
in March 2007. For more information contact Pokkoli at md2948@​mclink.it