Santa Lucia by Starlight: Poems

Michael Pearce’s narrative cycle of poems feels like Winesburg, Ohio filtered through One Hundred Years of Solitude. Santa Lucia, the narrator’s birthplace, is an imaginary town in Pearce’s mundanely surreal California. Santa Lucia is like an island, as all native places are idiosyncratic islands. At the same time, it is through and through an American place – America exposed, satirized, almost despised, but sadly, deeply, a little angrily attached. Then gradually, like a double exposure developing in its bath, you begin to see fragments, isolated but focused, of the narrator’s (the poet’s?) personal story showing through the surreal images of society and place. The book is also a strangely cryptic kind of nature poetry. One theme is how America distorts and perverts nature, and yet, I can’t say how, pure nature of America as-was, never quite seen, is always present as the cycle’s shadow. The book’s personality is sensitively masculine, mature but not too mature. Pearce is a tale teller, the voice is prose-like but carefully modulated, with inconspicuous, well-placed touches of lyric metaphor, never for their own sake – no poet virtue signaling. The prevailing mood is of struggle and disappointment, with at the same time, wisely brushed in only lightly, something close to ecstatic belonging. Lucia means light. Santa Lucia: light is holy. In Santa Lucia, (spoiler alert) starlight shines from underground – another duality in Pearce’s engagingly ambiguous world.