Description:
Gobbo: A Solitaire's Opera is a "natural opera." That is, it is the emotional arc of a poet's life rendered in poetry. It is loosely based on the life of the Italian poet, Giacomo Leopardi.
Brief description: David Cappella, Professor Emeritus of English and the 2017/2018 Poet-in-Residence at Central Connecticut State University, has co-authored two widely used poetry textbooks, Teaching the Art of Poetry: The Moves and A Surge of Language: Teaching Poetry Day to Day. He won the Bright Hill Press Poetry Chapbook Competition in 2006. His poems and essays have appeared in various literary journals and anthologies in the US and Europe. His novel, Kindling, has been called "a powerful and devastating coming-of-age story." Visit his university web site: http: //webcapp.ccsu.edu/?fsdMember=249
Review Quotes:
David Cappella's Gobbo is truly operatic as it makes us feel the heart and soul of a tortured yet remarkable poet. Through the deft use of form, Cappella maintains a constant window on a changeable man. Each aria-like poem articulates an aspect of Gobbo's experience while creating, as in opera, a powerful emotional skein. This is a life of a poet in poems. As such, its relevance is timeless.
-Baron Wormser
It is difficult for us who live in an anti-romantic age to grasp the consciousness of the romantic poet without the aura of the decorative, or the merely forlorn, obstructing our appreciation. We may sense a great reduction has come to pass regarding the ways of being available to a poet in today's world. In these poems, from the first act of David Cappella's Gobbo: A Solitaire's Opera, we are given, again, what poets in western societies have lost, the exquisitely articulated desires and claims of the young poet who has "no loves, no friends, nothing, just [his] studies" and yet, through the exercise of an intense imagination, finds comfort and confirmation in nature, books, language itself, and encounters with the beautiful and the infinite. It is high, grand stuff, true art, when a poet can embody the dance that transpires between the imagination and life lived in response to perceptions and circumstances. This is what David Cappella has created with delicacy and balance.
-Gray Jacobik