Ligatures [Paperback]

LIGATURES by Donato Mancini is being marketed to pick up on a little of that Christian Bok EUNOIA action (Canadian novelist Michael Turner writes on the back of the book that "In a post-poetry world, Mancini's a master chef"), and in some ways it takes the conceptual rigors of EUNOIA and stands them on their head, so that the change falls out of their pockets and clinks on the marble floor.

LIGATURES concerns itself with the way alphabetic characters look, it's a visual book punctuated with drawings, comics, cut-outs, reversed negatives, pictures made up out of floating words in pointillist fashion; it begins with our alphabet re-imagined so that the letters with dots on them (i, j) are joined by a host of other letters now dotted as well, so that the bs, ds, ts, look like the Elfish writing in LORD OF THE RINGS and the umlaut over the u gains historical perspective, not to mention a fantasy life that's enchanting and new. Mancini, an accomplished artist as well as a writer, does things with the look of the alphabet that makes Oulipo experiments seem like childs play, not that childs play is a bad thing, far from it. (A tricycle with no one sitting on it appears on the front cover of the book, like a talisman.)

From there on the census begins. In "Graphically Classifed Alphabets" the poet separates the wheat from the chaff. EFHLT is the alphabet reduced to its components with "Perpendicular Lines." "gfjpqy" are dippers, with long lines that descend past the customary line of type that controls our vision. ("bdhkl" are what Mancini calls "reachers," for up they go like lime trees.) Some letters are "tumblers," changing identity as they are turned at 90 degrees at a throw, E changing to M, H to I. The poem ends with a line of Qs, each one in a different font, and described variously as a "speech balloon," a "snail," a worm exiting an apple.

The title poem is even more miraculous, if you ask me, but maybe only because I'd be so bad at it. "Etruscan scandal dalliance cease aseptic tic-toc toccata" is one line, the next begins with "Catastrophe." OK, it doesn't make much sense literally, but once you grok onto it the fascination is intense, like the last fifty minutes of Clouzot's Le Salaire de la peur. The last few letters of each word appear as the opening letters of the succeeding word, and so on and so on. I tried it with my own name, to see how far I'd get, and I came to a humiliating halt at "Kevin vinegar uh, uh, uh" -- Couldn't think of a word that begins with "egar" (except for egare, the word we used to throw around, when I was an American boy growing up in France, for anyone who seemed like an "outsider.") Would "egare" really count in this poetry? Mancini uses "signor" to link "ensign" to "North,: and "Monicagate" to bridge the gap between "mnemonic" and "agateware." And sometimes not every letter in the center of each word gets shared on either side (i.e, "warehouse houseplant lantern" where the central "p" remains celibate, unpaired, the Edna May Oliver of the alphabet.

Without graphic aid I can barely even indicate what happens next in LIGATURES, but in general our durable alphabet gets twisted, torn, tormented and aroused. You know how that circa mark encapsulates the letter a in its own circular comet, the trademark sign similarly puts the letter r in a goldfish bowl? Imagine that every letter of the alphabet had its own container and thus, its own new meaning? "W" in a circle comes to stand in for "we," "y" for you or your. A comic strip follows, in which only these symbols appear in the balloons. Somehow one's faith in the letter is upheld, even when the figures in the comic lose their heads and balloons spout from bloody necks. Much later in LIGATURES, a love comic reiterates some of the same fatal points. Wish I had time to run down the remaining poems in the book, but obviously, I need some help here. This book had me standing up several times a day, so the book fell off my lap as my "lap" went away. The book, all dented now, remains a monument to the imagination, the strength of alphabet, as ivy and fluid, the way we keep making sense out of the insensible. Donato Mancini could teach symbolic logic to monkeys; he's sort of like the thinking man's Gilbert Adair. His LIGATURES will go down in mesostomatic history as the first poems to put hair on your brain.

Most contemporary, purportedly avante garde poetry is boring; an overdetermined fetishization of b.p. nichol's work that serves no purpose other than to prove that the writer has perhaps read the entire Martyrology, and you haven't. Donato Mancini's Ligatures, (New Star Books 2005) while echoing elements of nichol in a certain eroticization of the letter, is not one of those books. The title poem, "Ligature," creates resonance by using the last half of each word to form the first half of the next ("lemur murmur murder derange ranger angered") in seemingly endless permutations, and the "Starfield Series" splashes white words and letters against a black background to form elegant constellations that are visually, aurally and semantically arresting. In one inventive piece, "@phabet," Mancini takes the circled a, (@) better known as `at,' and develops his own shorthand alphabet, for example, a circled `s' becomes a symbol for she/her/hers. Patient readers will have fun using this alphabet to decipher the pulp fiction-esque cartoon "@phabet readers." The Concise Oxford Dictionary tells us that a ligature may be "two or more letters joined, e.g. ?," or "the act of tying or binding." The alphabet may in fact never recover from the binding (and gagging?) performed by Donato Mancini in this stimulating first collection.

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