The Last Song of the World
- By Christos Kalli

A Review of Joseph Fasano's The Last Song of the World (BOA Editions, 2024)
Like a deep breath, like a flower that blooms against the relentless elements of an inhospitable season, Joseph Fasano’s The Last Song of the World begins with “Sudden Hymn in Winter,” a short but powerful poem, functioning almost as the collection’s own epigraph:
What if, after years
of trial,
a love should come
and lay a hand upon you
and say,
this late
your life is not a crime
In the simple language with which he constructs intricate images throughout this book, Fasano uses the second person pronoun “you,” turning almost confrontationally to the reader and himself, to pose a hypothetical question: how would you structure your life differently without self-punishment? The first in a cycle of hymns—a genre developed in a heap of literary and liturgical traditions, often focusing on an object of praise—"Sudden Hymn” wants us to rethink, if not celebrate, the tribulations of life. Privileging enjambment and refusing a final caesura that would impose an end, Fasano’s opening poem activates the mighty distinction between last and final: the singing continuous, “after years / of trial,” after the last song of the world.
For Fasano, as the first poem shows, the keywords of this continuation are “after” and “love.” The former appears repeatedly as a preposition, conjunction, adverb, and, most strikingly, noun—as in the eponymous poem “After,” in which the reader is moved beyond “the house of shadows”—while the latter contours almost every facet of this collection. In the poem “After Love” the two keywords come together to form the building blocks for a theory of love:
Wake now. Stay here
in your waking
and do it, finally
do it: open
to the whole of it, the whole of it,
the wind that sings
what’s been since the beginning.
Listen. Listen. Listen.
Tender, forceful, and understanding at once, the poetic voice addresses the reader with an accumulation of imperative verbs, such as “[w]ake,” “open,” and “[l]isten.” Who is speaking here, and to whom? Could this be not the voice of human wisdom but of persistent love, calling from the after, asking you to open your eyes, to capaciously expand your arms, to embrace the sensuous? The resounding ‘whole of it’ at the center of this poem, and arguably the collection in its entirety, employs a supercharged form of the pronoun ‘it’ that is equated with life, everything, and being. In the best of his poems, Fasano ambitiously searches, embraces, and examines the value in ‘the whole of it’—the small, seemingly insignificant moments, the painful events that mark us—yet remains grounded in the same emotional and intellectual depth that emanates from this passage.
This pursuit is not merely theoretical, abstract, or philosophical but one with specific coordinates. Fasano turns to the ruins of history and mythology, our relationships to animals and the environment, our affinities with friends and enemies, our connections to students and teachers, and, most prominently, fatherhood. In “Games,” a conceptually playful and innovative sonnet, he explores his infant’s language learning in relation to paternal authority and wisdom. Composed almost as a found poem, “with each line ending with one of [his] son’s first words” as he writes in the beginning, “Games” starts as a father’s clear reflection on time addressed to his child, but takes a turn in the last two stanzas:
But now you wake and find me at my chess—
trying light with darkness, learning how—
and climb to me, and give me my king a throw,
and laugh at me, and look at me again
as though to ask what game we’re playing now,
No games, Love. You win. I give. Hello.
Marking this volta with the conjunction “[b]ut,’ the poem becomes less and less grammatically comprehensible, losing its linear sequence of thought, and breaking down syntactically with erratic punctuation. The intricacy between poetic form and emotion here is extraordinary. As he borrows from the still emerging vocabulary of the child, Fasano eliminates the vertical distance between them: the child is learning, but the father is learning, too; in fact, the child is teaching the father to unlearn. This moment between father and son, interacting in the poem and on its form, may speak to the anxieties of parenthood, or to the closeness between playing and learning, or to the tension between love and giving up. Yet it certainly encompasses one form of “the whole of it,” all in the intimate greeting with which the poem ends—“Hello,” not “goodbye”—where the words of the poet-father and child converge.
Fasano is a poet of fatherhood, intimacy, friendship, love, and so much more, which is to say, he is a poet for the living, for life. Reading this, during a time of quotidian personal issues and large-scale problems, I thought of beginnings, not ends. And I will continue to rethink of the collection’s last lines: “the silence of any end or wreckage / is the same as the great and ancient silence / that comes before beginning starts to sing.”
CHRISTOS KALLI (he/him), born and raised in Cyprus, is a doctoral student in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. His critical writing appears in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Chicago Review of Books, and the Harvard Review, among others.