by Marco Melfi
Gaspereau Press
2025/$23.95/96 pp.
Gaspereau Press has long produced beautiful books, their covers gorgeously textured, unspoiled by blurbs, and, within, an array of solidly crafted poems.
Marco Melfi’s Routine Maintenance is no exception. Most of the pieces in this debut are “thing” lyrics, one-page descriptors of screen doors, winter tires, alarm clock radios or balloons, while others are depictions of people as still lives held in the amber eye of attentiveness: a soccer coach, a cobbler, a sound tech, hockey dads and a neighbour who grossly horks like “a lawn mower’s false start… a yolky lime slug” (“The Neighbour’s Loogie”). Thing poems, otherwise known by the German term Dinggedicht (as coined by scholar Kurt Oppert), are a type of verse developed in the 19th century in which objects are not merely depicted but also personified or described in a language that seems innate to that tool, structure or natural entity. Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” (1908) is one early example, and poet Kayla Czaga also utilizes this mode in poems such as “The Hairbrush,” from her 2024 collection Midway.
Melfi has a fantastic ear and that makes all the difference to his at times banal or excessively masculinized materials. I never imagined being interested in “The Appliance Repair Guy’s Insights” until I read the lines “His drill screams like teens on e-scooters./ Screws teeter loose. He unlatches the plastic/ and the dishwasher’s innards unspool.” Nor the thoughts of “The Furnace’s Blow Motor,” but listen to its sonorous complaints: “You ignored the ironing-board-singed scent… how much lint and dander those guys choke on” and, at the end, its funny advice to replace the windows as “They’ve been drafty since Chrétien.” The sensitivity to vowel sounds is particularly apparent, demanding these poems be read aloud. The strongest pieces are those connecting objects and people to Melfi’s history, especially to his Nonno, his grandfather. From the first poem, “My Grandfather Taught Me To Fish,” with its crisp triadic stanzas (“Maybe that afternoon was more than a lesson/ He gave me his rod, lures and bait to keep/ it was our only session”), to later when he finds Nonno’s “Union Manual” (“black lettering with that iconic CN logo”), the bond between thing, place, person, language and form render such poems potent.
Although Melfi’s lyrics can be a tad too cutesy, as when a felled sign is compared to “an injured athlete” or fissured Safeway bags are envisioned as “pickled” into a “funk,” Routine Maintenance is a delectable-for-the-ear examination of what we usually dismiss without the respect it deserves—that potato wedger, or waste collector, or grade school caretaker who magically, for years, “scraped, without scuff, gummed desks.”
Catherine Owen is the author of Moving to Delilah (2024).
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