The tantalising title of Rita Tognini’s collection points to a poet exploring many questions about Australia and her place in it. The poems provide an intricate search for the subtleties of personal identity, stretched between her birth country of Italy with its wealth of family connections and memories, and modern Western Australia which has long become more than ‘the land of upside down’. This process is complicated but enriched by the thinking of a person for whom language is not just a means of communication but something in which she lives, as elemental as the weather. Italian and English help determine the way she experiences both inner life and the outside world, and give her a point
of subtlety from which to view subjects as diverse as Emily Dickinson, scientific thought, the animal world, and Aboriginal culture.
Almost Like Home is a poised collection of intelligence, sensory vivacity and ongoing curiosity.
Dennis Haskell
Emeritus Professor
Poet and Literary Essayist
———
Almost Like Home illuminates that when we change homelands, we expand identity and perspective, ways of understanding both the self and the world, become someone new. At the same time, we are left vulnerable in our understanding of personal identity, and are led to question how changing place and language affects the way we feel, think, be: ‘see the bones/ of our discarded speech/ shining in moonlight/ follow them/ back into the home/ of our mother tongue’
A rediscovery of ancestors reminds of who we once were, as well as our connection to place as a means of belonging—including our new home. Epiphanies come in the metaphorical, in traffic, ‘I’m bad at merging…if it’s my fate/ never to merge’, but then in the garden, ‘I grow where you confine me/ my spikes unfolding as a fan’. An intelligent, empathic and astutely composed collection.
Shey Marque
Poet
Almost Like Home – Australia
Includes postage within Australia
A$30.00
Almost Like Home – International
For all international purchases. Includes postage to the world
A$40.00
Launch Speech by Rose van Son
‘We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time’
———————————— T.S. Eliot, from ‘Little Gidding’ Four Quartets
Almost Like Home, Rita Tognini’s first collection has arrived! A poet’s first collection is the most exciting event, the most memorable. I had the honour and pleasure of reading this collection whilst it was still in manuscript form and before it was sent for consideration to a publisher, and I knew then, as I sat up most of the night, reading each of its four sections, it would be a favourite. For Rita explores what was lost, then found; she takes her readers back to the past, to the beginning, before her knowledge of this country, its landscape and language.
I’ve also had the pleasure of following Rita’s poetic journey and know that fortunate indeed is the publisher, in this case, WA Poets Press, who accepts this exceptional collection of works, poems that shine with place, power and beauty; poems to travel with, or to treasure by the bedside, to read over and again.
And fortunate, too, the lovers of poetry and literature, who delve into its pages to enjoy, as you would enjoy a fine wine, or the unique and individual petals of a loved flower, centred with the stamen of its ancestors, a gathering of all its parts, its wisdom, its finesse, clasped in a bouquet and gifted to the reader. This is indeed a fine collection; a nurturing, intelligent read, for its scope is broad, and its depth profound.
For Rita is master of language with a PhD in Applied Linguistics, but that, in itself, as we know, does not make a poet—a poet has passion for sound, for nuance, for complexity and simplicity, for breath, for understanding essence and allegory.
In this collection, Rita has braided all of this knowledge, knowledge she has carried with her, packaged her poems in English, Italian and the dialect of her birthplace, her mother’s village, welcomes us as we travel with her; find our footing in unfamiliar places.
Poet T.S. Eliot, says, the poet may begin with very personal feelings but the talent of the poet lies in ‘transforming them…’ Rita shares so many feelings here, yet it is in the concrete that the detail, the imagery, shines through place and identity—the emotion Rita wraps in hard surfaces, tumbles out – takes us by surprise.
On p. 64, In Elegies, Crossing the Line: in short staccato lines, Rita writes, ‘I didn’t understand / your disappearance /or why that afternoon / turned black with wailing…’ // you’d gone beyond the river / and railway line, to check a field /
flooded by autumn rains //
But let’s return to the beginning, Part I of the collection: Learning the Language the story of Hansel and Gretel in Australia:
Having left the Valtellina in Northern Italy, the child Rita, lands in the fantasy world of Hansel and Gretel in Australia, and this, a memory from a child’s perspective, because perspective, is paramount to poetry, to all writing.
On page 7, the poet, writes,
There was no rehearsal / as in the old tale. Father took us straight to the witch / left us in the school room decorated with words / enticing as gingerbread. Not speaking our tongue / she fed us her language. // Hungry for meaning / we gorged that lexicon / grew fat on her vernacular. // Then she let us out to play / sure we would not stray into the forest / see the bones of our discarded speech / shining in moonlight / follow them / back to the house // of our mother tongue.
So many standout poems! So many wonderful epigraphs, too, punctuate Rita’s poems, but you will have the opportunity to read them for yourselves.
In Part two, beautiful Tributes to her parents, My Father’s War, and My Mother’s War, Rita writes of her parents’ hardship during World War Two. We are down to the bare minimum – language is sparse, and food – that which is most necessary for survival.
My Father’s War – Albania: 19th March 1940. (Page. 22 second stanza) –
‘Someone gave him food; small green
plums he thought. He tasted
expecting a sweet transparency
but dense, sour, salty flesh
filled his mouth.
It was some time
before he could relish
the taste of an olive.’
The Lights of Silvaplana: November 1944 (p. 25) the last stanza of her Father’s War, begins: ‘after the Anglo-American Armistice’ …
This is a particularly rich, moving stanza…I’ll let you read it in your own time.
With the power of words, metaphor and repetition, Rita’s stories move us to tears. She harnesses language to console and to nurture, to remind us of the bravery of those who endured war, and also their internal war, the immigrants who left home and family behind, in another hemisphere – to begin life anew. Here.
Through her poetry, Rita speaks of culture and identity, for her language brims with cultural experience. Her inspirations include art, history, music, travel, and the importance and value of the human condition, the connections we need to make, our eyes wide open, to keep connected.
Some of the other poems include: ‘Dante and the Blue Whale Skeleton; ‘Trapping Rabbits;’ Berlin, October, 2015; Nanjing fall, and A Lover’s Guide to Musical Terms—over 100 pages of the art of poetry, and humour too!
A rich and diverse collection, Almost Like Home comes with a bonus Introduction by Rita herself, and photographs of family.
I can’t begin to give this collection the credit it deserves—suffice to say, Almost Like Home, will surpass your expectations. A fine collection richly ground in the imperfections of the past, and catapulted into the complexities and humanity of the present.
Congratulations, Rita and WA Poets Publishing—
So many stunning poems, stories passionately told from a poet at the heart of her writing career. It gives me great pleasure to send Rita Tognini’s Almost Like Home, home to the hearts, and minds, of lovers of quality poetry everywhere! Now Launched!!!
Rose van Son
2nd June, 2024
Review: ‘Almost Like Home’ by Rita Tognini
(WA Poets Publishing) Reviewed by Will Yeoman
JUL 03, 2024
https://writingwa.substack.com/p/review-almost-like-home-by-rita-tognini
“So, yes, I agree, without the stars
there’s no Dante…”
John Kinsella, Canto: polystyrene soliloquy
Rita Tognini’s poems punch holes in the night sky. Truth shines through. Almost Like Home is a knockout, and Dennis Haskell is right to write, on the back cover, that it’s “a poised collection of intelligence, sensory vivacity and ongoing curiosity.”
In her own introduction to Almost Like Home, the Italian-born Tognini reveals that she started writing poetry in her late teens (although she arrived in Australia with her family at the age of six, she moved to Perth in her late teens, too – a coincidence?), and that she wanted to begin her collection with poems about language learning because, “As a migrant who learned English as a third language, I felt compelled to explore that experience, especially from a child’s perspective.”
(Tognini’s interest in languages is also technical: she has a PhD in applied linguistics.)
What unites these poems, previously published over a number of years in isolation and now cleverly curated into five sections, is this fascination, almost obsession, with language; but also with concepts of place, home, family, history, memory and identity.
Sometimes it’s as though Tognini, knowing more than one home and more than one language, is seeking an “authentic” home via language, destined to be forever belonging-adjacent. In the title poem, about poet Salvatore Quasimodo’s daily train journey from Milan to Sondrio in the Italian Alps, she writes:
“He alights, his mind
in a place of ‘magpies,
salt and eucalyptus’,
walks out to the mountain town
that some days
feels almost like home.”
What a strange accidental evocation, in Quasimodo’s quoted words, of Western Australia! And how like a mirror of Tognini’s putative meditations.
These poems are about a different kind of loss, too, one inevitable for those of us who have lived long enough in the world. But again, language still shares the stage.
For example, take the last stanza of Learning the Language, which like the later sequence, Elegies, is particularly poignant:
“‘Thank you for everything,’ were her last words
to me. I wish I had been there an hour later
to cradle her last breath
with a plangent ninnananna.
And to whisper—Amen and così sia.”
Also: the tension, here and throughout the entire poem, between love and a kind of emotional exile, which recalls these lines from Pasolini’s Prayer to My Mother:
“You’re irreplaceable. And because you are,
the life you gave me is condemned to loneliness.”
(trans. Norman MacAffee)
Elsewhere, there’s more of a lightness, a playfulness (especially with language). In Season of Silence birds “dressed like trapeze artists” links up, many lines further down, with two girls who “came with a rope of words.” And in Hansel and Gretel in Australia, where she writes “Hungry for meaning/we gorged that lexicon/ grew fat on her vernacular,” the assonance between “fat” and “vernacular” unites two seemingly disparate words in a more local and musical way.
One more: in A Lover’s Guide to Musical Terms, Tognini riffs off Italian musical terms such as pianissimo, andante, pizzicato, attacca, andante, cantabile, and, my favourite, codetta:
“Ah, the sting! The unexpected turn,
the ritornello that impertinently comes
again, provokes, allows us to discern
once more and return our delights.”
There are also the semi-ekphrastic poems in Family Album (the gorgeous photographs are included), and Script, a villanelle on an ancient artefact, a lice comb fashioned from an ivory tusk which bears the inscription, in “an ancient Judaic tongue”: “May this tusk root out lice in light and in gloam.”
And so much more to enjoy here, to savour (devour!). But to fast-forward to the penultimate poem in the book, Dante and the Blue Whale Skeleton, we find Tognini at her most metaphysical, in the poetic as well as in the philosophical sense, the arching skeleton of a blue whale suspended like a huge memento moriabove a lecture audience rhyming with “the spheres of paradise/that curve over Dante/in the fresco, on screen.”
Formally, thematically, sensuously and lyrically impressive, Almost Like Home (re)presents a poet at the height of her powers, the disarming ease and fluency of the writing freighting home complex, shimmering webs of thought and feeling.