Eli was a poetic storyteller, recounting a visit with a friend in a mental hospital (“At a Locked Facility Somewhere Inland”), or casting the poet’s eye over an ordinary citizen’s experience of the judicial system (“Jury Duty”), or singing the song of college financial aid (“Dues”), or crystallizing her own history and illness into four stanzas and a couplet both delicately precise and diamond-hard (“Enlightenment and Muscular Dystrophy”). “Suite: The Hot Charade” combines narrative and rant to draw an intimate picture of what it was like to hold “a fistful of desires” in an intensely alive young woman’s skin in an American city in the early 1990s. “stranger” takes us on a ride in which the poet gets lost and discovers the possibility of god in the North Carolina backwoods. Her poems are notes from all over, and each finds its own readers—at the book’s launch reading in San Francisco in May, a good number of her friends and fellow poets took turns introducing the audience to the Eli Coppola poems that had touched them most deeply, and the reading made the range and variety of her work most evident.
Some of the most valuable treasures in this collection are among the previously unpublished poems in the last section of the book. “Wedding Poem” was a commission for two marrying friends; in the author’s introductory note Eli confesses her reluctance as a single survivor of innumerable failed romances to write to order about marriage. But she also considers herself “an incurable romantic” and the poem she wrote is full of proverbs, echoing Paul’s letter to the Corinthians on love and then commanding the newlywed couple back to the present moment:
When you are weary, imagine this place.A bit of good advice, an explication of the purpose of such ceremonies as marriage, and a summary of Eli’s poetic modus operandi, all in five lines.
When you are angry, remember this place.
When you lose your way, return to this place.
Look out over the edge of the world
and listen to anything that speaks to you.
The last poem in Some Angels Wear Black, and the last poem read at the San Francisco celebration, is Eli’s farewell, “make of me many miracles.” Like so many of her other poems, it is both a heartbreakingly intimate personal statement and a clear-eyed commentary on the society and the planet she lived in, its needs and illusions and injustices and beauties. Eli Coppola did the work of a poet in her short lifetime, creating beauty from personal knowledge and polished words, and this book is a fitting legacy. I promise if you read it, you will find poems to treasure and remember.
