Poetry review – THE WEIGHT OF SOUND
Charles Rammelkamp finds rich detail and skilful understatement in Mariano Zaro’s poems
The Weight of Sound
Mariano Zaro
Walton Well Press, 2025
$20.00, 92 pages
ISBN: 978-1-964295-12-1
In the ironically titled poem, “Small Talk,” Mariano Zaro writes about going to a birthday party in a restaurant in Malibu, a self-described ‘peripheral guest, / sitting at a table with other peripheral guests.’ He’s fully expecting to answer the usual inane party questions about where he is from, etc., when the lady sitting next to him tells him about discovering her parents’ bodies, after a murder-suicide. She’d found them in their car, parked behind their house. They’d been married over fifty years. Both had serious health issues. The lady goes into detail about how they were dressed, how she found them.
They had it all very well planned, my parents. But I didn’t know.
We don’t know
what’s going on in people’s heads, do we?
They left a note on the kitchen table,
and the driver’s licenses, together, touching,
one next to the other,
like twins, both expired.
So many of Zaro’s poems are written with this matter-of-fact precision, the details so mundane, so specific, while the implicit drama is enough to make your head spin. In the first and final sections of this four-part collection, especially, the situations are dire and emotionally fraught. “Exoskeleton” describes a disabled person’s trials with leg braces and a crutch. “Synapse” is about his dying father lying in a hospital with a neurological disorder (‘Soon, my father says, / you will put two silver coins over my eyes.’) “The Mercy of Memory” is about scars, specifically a woman with a shattered elbow. “Thermostat” is about his mother in a nursing home. She has dementia (‘Are you my son or my grandson? How old are you?’) “After the Diagnosis” involves a homeless man with serious health issues. “An Elementary School in Los Angeles: After the Summer Break” spotlights a young student’s serious eye infection, and “First Communion,” which also takes place in a Los Angeles classroom, involves a person with a fatal disease.
In “Brother” the poet, then six years old, questions his mother about his older brother who died after only being alive for one year. It’s a subject he’d never had the nerve to bring up before, and without specifically saying so, it must have haunted him constantly. In “Mouth to Mouth” father and son bury a dead dog, the household pet. “Orchids and Other Animals” involves a visit with a friend who is wasting away in a greenhouse, where he has chosen to live since his partner’s death, the actual residence being just too emotionally fraught. In “Vocative,” the final poem in The Weight of Sound, we’re back with the demented mother.
These all present quietly desperate scenes, such intense emotion but with no sturm und drang. Zaro is showing us existence unvarnished, unromanticized. As he writes in “After the Diagnosis”:
The body follows you wherever you go,
and sleeps with you every night,
like a lover who cannot breathe without
your lungs and, without your eyes
cannot wake up the next morning.
Throughout the collection Zaro presents numerous factual details that inform the poems. “Annunciation” is full of biographical data about the Renaissance painter, Fra Angelico. The poem is set at the Prado in Madrid. The poet and a friend are considering “The Annunciation.” They overhear a guide describing the painstaking restoration of the masterpiece when they see a man eating a sandwich in the museum cafe. The friend remarks that the man reminds him of his father. And then we get this intriguing passage:
My father was so good at hiding things.
And then he did what he did, you say.
Do you think of him often? I ask.
More often now than when he was alive, you say.
There’s a whole lifetime of unspoken tragedy in that simple exchange. What was it the father did? What did he hide? Was he deceitful or just excessively private? And the son? It’s plain he’s been traumatized.
In “Portraits,” it’s the portrait painter Henry Lamb whose biography is fleshed out, from his birth in Australia to his marriages and tenure at the Tate Gallery and finally his death in a Salisbury nursing home, all presented as background information. Meanwhile, the poet observes the portraits of a boy reading a book, wearing a purple tie, a girl in a gray wool skirt, a book open on her lap. The paintings, too, are described in detail.
And it’s not just painters. Zara goes into excruciating detail about neurons and synapses in “Synapse,” brain cells in “Thermostat,” French filmmakers in “Mandarin at the Edge of a White Formica Table,” a poem in which he is at his French professor’s apartment, a man to whom he is obviously attracted.
The etymology of the word “candid” is detailed in “Candid, As Remembered,” a poem involving a Latin teacher. The word originally meant “white,” before it primarily signified honesty. Other quirky details include snails in “Reading the Diaries of Patricia Highsmith,” saliva in “Enzymes,” a poem about a father and daughter in a small restaurant in Madrid, hemoglobin in “The Discovery of Red,” soil and mineral nutrients in “Mouth to Mouth,” Latin verb forms in “Vocative.” Zaro’s research and the elusive ways the details inform the narratives are subtle and suggest deeper emotional resonances to the stories.
The poet’s sexuality is likewise an elusive theme. “My Sister Holds My Hand in the Dark” takes place in 1976, when the poet is twelve years old, his sister twenty-two. ‘Franco has just died.’ They are there with her sister’s boyfriend (‘He has long hair, wears a braided / leather jacket’) who thinks the movie they are about to see may be too “adult” for him.
You know he is not like the other kids,
my sister says.
This is the beginning of labeling.
My sister holds my hand
in some scenes:
shards of glass in Cries and Whispers,
the rape in Two Women,
when Charlotte Ramping dances
in The Night Porter.
I want to be like them, I tell my sister
when we leave.
To be like who? She asks.
Like the people in the movies.
This is the beginning of pretending.
Likewise elusive, the book title The Weight of Sound suggests this accumulation of emotional pressure on the experience of the compromised characters that populate Zaro’s poems, characters who are anxious and troubled if not downright tragic. It’s a weight of silence, too. Indeed, Zaro’s poetry is so eloquent in the things it does not say but merely suggests. Perhaps this is why the overtly didactic elements are so effective, the voice assertive and confident, in contrast to that heavy sound of secrecy, that crushing sub- and/or super-sonic noise of daily lives being lived.
Mar 10 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Mariano Zaro
Poetry review – THE WEIGHT OF SOUND
Charles Rammelkamp finds rich detail and skilful understatement in Mariano Zaro’s poems
The Weight of Sound
Mariano Zaro
Walton Well Press, 2025
$20.00, 92 pages
ISBN: 978-1-964295-12-1
In the ironically titled poem, “Small Talk,” Mariano Zaro writes about going to a birthday party in a restaurant in Malibu, a self-described ‘peripheral guest, / sitting at a table with other peripheral guests.’ He’s fully expecting to answer the usual inane party questions about where he is from, etc., when the lady sitting next to him tells him about discovering her parents’ bodies, after a murder-suicide. She’d found them in their car, parked behind their house. They’d been married over fifty years. Both had serious health issues. The lady goes into detail about how they were dressed, how she found them.
They had it all very well planned, my parents. But I didn’t know.
We don’t know
what’s going on in people’s heads, do we?
They left a note on the kitchen table,
and the driver’s licenses, together, touching,
one next to the other,
like twins, both expired.
So many of Zaro’s poems are written with this matter-of-fact precision, the details so mundane, so specific, while the implicit drama is enough to make your head spin. In the first and final sections of this four-part collection, especially, the situations are dire and emotionally fraught. “Exoskeleton” describes a disabled person’s trials with leg braces and a crutch. “Synapse” is about his dying father lying in a hospital with a neurological disorder (‘Soon, my father says, / you will put two silver coins over my eyes.’) “The Mercy of Memory” is about scars, specifically a woman with a shattered elbow. “Thermostat” is about his mother in a nursing home. She has dementia (‘Are you my son or my grandson? How old are you?’) “After the Diagnosis” involves a homeless man with serious health issues. “An Elementary School in Los Angeles: After the Summer Break” spotlights a young student’s serious eye infection, and “First Communion,” which also takes place in a Los Angeles classroom, involves a person with a fatal disease.
In “Brother” the poet, then six years old, questions his mother about his older brother who died after only being alive for one year. It’s a subject he’d never had the nerve to bring up before, and without specifically saying so, it must have haunted him constantly. In “Mouth to Mouth” father and son bury a dead dog, the household pet. “Orchids and Other Animals” involves a visit with a friend who is wasting away in a greenhouse, where he has chosen to live since his partner’s death, the actual residence being just too emotionally fraught. In “Vocative,” the final poem in The Weight of Sound, we’re back with the demented mother.
These all present quietly desperate scenes, such intense emotion but with no sturm und drang. Zaro is showing us existence unvarnished, unromanticized. As he writes in “After the Diagnosis”:
The body follows you wherever you go,
and sleeps with you every night,
like a lover who cannot breathe without
your lungs and, without your eyes
cannot wake up the next morning.
Throughout the collection Zaro presents numerous factual details that inform the poems. “Annunciation” is full of biographical data about the Renaissance painter, Fra Angelico. The poem is set at the Prado in Madrid. The poet and a friend are considering “The Annunciation.” They overhear a guide describing the painstaking restoration of the masterpiece when they see a man eating a sandwich in the museum cafe. The friend remarks that the man reminds him of his father. And then we get this intriguing passage:
My father was so good at hiding things.
And then he did what he did, you say.
Do you think of him often? I ask.
More often now than when he was alive, you say.
There’s a whole lifetime of unspoken tragedy in that simple exchange. What was it the father did? What did he hide? Was he deceitful or just excessively private? And the son? It’s plain he’s been traumatized.
In “Portraits,” it’s the portrait painter Henry Lamb whose biography is fleshed out, from his birth in Australia to his marriages and tenure at the Tate Gallery and finally his death in a Salisbury nursing home, all presented as background information. Meanwhile, the poet observes the portraits of a boy reading a book, wearing a purple tie, a girl in a gray wool skirt, a book open on her lap. The paintings, too, are described in detail.
And it’s not just painters. Zara goes into excruciating detail about neurons and synapses in “Synapse,” brain cells in “Thermostat,” French filmmakers in “Mandarin at the Edge of a White Formica Table,” a poem in which he is at his French professor’s apartment, a man to whom he is obviously attracted.
The etymology of the word “candid” is detailed in “Candid, As Remembered,” a poem involving a Latin teacher. The word originally meant “white,” before it primarily signified honesty. Other quirky details include snails in “Reading the Diaries of Patricia Highsmith,” saliva in “Enzymes,” a poem about a father and daughter in a small restaurant in Madrid, hemoglobin in “The Discovery of Red,” soil and mineral nutrients in “Mouth to Mouth,” Latin verb forms in “Vocative.” Zaro’s research and the elusive ways the details inform the narratives are subtle and suggest deeper emotional resonances to the stories.
The poet’s sexuality is likewise an elusive theme. “My Sister Holds My Hand in the Dark” takes place in 1976, when the poet is twelve years old, his sister twenty-two. ‘Franco has just died.’ They are there with her sister’s boyfriend (‘He has long hair, wears a braided / leather jacket’) who thinks the movie they are about to see may be too “adult” for him.
You know he is not like the other kids,
my sister says.
This is the beginning of labeling.
My sister holds my hand
in some scenes:
shards of glass in Cries and Whispers,
the rape in Two Women,
when Charlotte Ramping dances
in The Night Porter.
I want to be like them, I tell my sister
when we leave.
To be like who? She asks.
Like the people in the movies.
This is the beginning of pretending.
Likewise elusive, the book title The Weight of Sound suggests this accumulation of emotional pressure on the experience of the compromised characters that populate Zaro’s poems, characters who are anxious and troubled if not downright tragic. It’s a weight of silence, too. Indeed, Zaro’s poetry is so eloquent in the things it does not say but merely suggests. Perhaps this is why the overtly didactic elements are so effective, the voice assertive and confident, in contrast to that heavy sound of secrecy, that crushing sub- and/or super-sonic noise of daily lives being lived.