Stefano, Dante Di: Midwhistle

University of Wisconsin Press, paperback

Publication Date: March 1, 2023

Publisher Marketing:

“Midwhistle proves Dante Di Stefano ‘a child / of cello, air, & mint spears.’ In this refulgent homage, Di Stefano honors ‘what loves / have been thrummed forth & nurtured / into shining’ by poet William Heyen’s august work and person. Surely any reader will leave this book, as I did, more alert and alive, more ‘in love / with the gray undersides of / mulberry leaves & the way / the grass ekes toward twilight.’”
—H. L. Hix

Appearing on the first page of Dante Di Stefano’s Midwhistle, a flock of blackbirds braids its way throughout this book-length poem—an elegy to life itself. A sprawling, digressive love note to an unborn son, it is also a celebration of the life and legacy of poet William Heyen, a meditation on midlife, and an exploration of the food and fuel of poetry itself.

Di Stefano travels through a controlled stream of consciousness as he examines the weights of joy and grief. Bearing witness to the world, Midwhistle unfolds and refolds upon itself, touching on Hiroshima, Bergen-Belsen, Charlottesville, the sacoglossan sea slug, Darwin's Arch, and much more. Stylistically formal, the poem soars and dips, lightly and deftly finding the light in nighttime meditations, as the poet considers “our Unyet son, lemon-sized, / amniotic cosmonaut,” while imagining Heyen at his own age, “the thin black necktie of your / apprenticeship had not been / taken off yet.”

In these examinations we find the poet himself, faced always with a “blinking / cursor,” seeking in the words and lives of other poets what it really means to write poetry. Midwhistle, in its meandering self-reflection and loving expansiveness, is a celebration of the act of poetic creation itself.

Remember, to be
human is to be broken
&, to be broken, is to
see the almond blossom burst
under the closed eyelids of

your beloved.
—Excerpt from “xxiii. (interlude: prayer for Gaza)”