A Short Supply of Viability
by Annette Gagliardi
70 Poems ~ 101 pages
Price: $18.00
Publisher: The Poetry Box
ISBN: 978-1-956285-15-4
To Order: The Poetry Box
Reviewed by Michael Escoubas
This is poetry about caregiving. Keyword: Viability. Having witnessed my own brother’s decade-long decline and subsequent death, due to Alzheimer’s disease, viability never entered my mind as a descriptor. With that said, that term’s “reality” was never far from my thinking. Annette Gagliardi’s latest collection A Short Supply of Viability explores and vindicates her choice.
Definitions & Questions
Gagliardi’s helpful preface defines viability as:
The ability to work successfully; the ability to survive or live successfully, perhaps to flourish–be fruitful, and multiply.
She also asks significant questions:
“Can we look at the facts of dying and still go on with our lives?” She also brings up things that often go unnoticed: “Sometimes the person who is physically declining is in better condition than the caregivers who live with the stress and grief of giving care.”
Organization
A Short Supply of Viability is organized into three divisions whose provocative titles provide clues as to the poet’s overall thrust. These include: The Death that Duty Brings; Things I can’t Remember, and Quicksand. I was edified as I connected individual poems to their respective categories. I use the term “category” advisedly because Gagliardi is not a slave to her categories. Rather, she is free within them.
Craftsmanship & Style
Gagliardi is an accomplished free verse poet. As such she is full of stylistic surprises. I marveled at her use of indentations often opening her poems with an indented line and varying the indents and interlinear spacing. These techniques made me pause momentarily for reflection. At times her indentations seemed wildly random. I wondered, “What’s going on here?” As I lingered within each poem’s body, she brought me ever closer to her heart. I felt a certain darkness within the collection. However, darkness does not dominate this poet. The best poets are compelling because they tell the truth. When we care (as I cared for my dying brother) the heart and psyche are punished like a boxer against the ropes absorbing blows.
Examples of a Poet’s Heart
Gagliardi’s passionate love, burdened by care, takes centerstage in a poem entitled, “I am asleep, but my heart keeps vigil.” from Song of Solomon, chapter 5 v. 2:
The soft shelter of slumber
rests upon my breast,
all that’s left after
the murder of innocence.
Witness the martyrs
suffer for their faith.
Why should we suffer?
My heart waits. Its pain
framed in a dream.
I watch, ever alert
yet, peacefully passive.
I snooze in the sanctuary–
my anchor, my port.
I dare to doze;
defend my dozing.
I drift off while
the day draws near.
Be merciful, oh Lord.
These gentle verses are complemented with another poetry skill … easy, balanced diction and natural internal rhyme. Thus, through poetry, Gagliardi posits life’s most compelling question: Why do we suffer? The refrain Be merciful, oh Lord, must suffice, emerging as it does, out of the deepest recesses of her heart. Entreating the mercy of God always laid softly on my mind, as my brother lay helpless toward the end.
“I Feel Your Pain,” reflects a similar pathos:
I don’t presume to know the
depth nor the breadth of your suffering,
but my own experience has touched
the surface of that deep pool.
As the poem moves toward its gentle conclusion, I identified with her felt pathos:
Yet, I feel no compulsion to spew
my desolation into the stratosphere.
… …
I need only see your face
to taste your hurting.
A Short Supply of Viability speaks to my heart in real time, because Annette Gagliardi lived out each poem in real time. She writes about what she knows and now, this reviewer has a changed heart. As the poet notes in her dedication page, these poems are To all caregivers whose tender mercies provide a better life for those drowning in the ever-rising waters of decline.
This review is dedicated to the memory of Thomas Wesley Escoubas, June 24, 1948–November 8, 2025.
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