Keeping My Name

2005 Poets' Prize * Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist * Booklist Editors' Choice 2004 “For formalists, this author comes as a gift, a poet fully in charge of her forms, subtle and controlled. She embraces the villanele, Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets, the measured quatrain, rhymed couplets. . . . What excites the reader is watching Tufariello use the limits of these traditions to stretch her creativity.” —ForeWord. “In immaculate, subtly musical meter and rhyme, Tufariello conjures scenes of the city, modern history, marriage and family, love in the Italian Renaissance, and the women of the Bible that fully engage the mind and the heart.” —Booklist. “Tufariello ranges widely in form and subject, all with such aplomb that no less an expert than Richard Wilbur praises her ‘plain, supple eloquence’ and ‘easy command of rhyme, measure, and form.’ . . . Resourcefulness and restraint are rare qualities in contemporary poetry. . . . Tufariello’s poems provide such eloquent examples that I feel no need to explain further.” —R. S. Gwynn, The Hudson Review. With a distinctive blend of craft and deep feeling, clarity and subtle thought, Catherine Tufariello gives new resonance to the historical and mythic past by drawing larger significance and universal themes from contemporary life. From “The Walrus at Coney Island”: All watchers gasp together as he dives, The clumsy fore fins clever now as knives, The dark head bobbing in the dazzling spray Of sun-shot water, like a child’s at play. So this is what he is, has always been— A gleaming, sleekly muscled submarine, Lithe as a dancer, roguish as a boy, Corkscrewing downward with what looks like joy.