A review of Don DiVecchio's collected works.

Voices From The Invisible. Plays, Poetry and Stories. Don Divecchio. (Front Cover Art: Richard Wilhelm.) Waking Hearts Press  $16

Political activist, poet, artist and playwright Don DiVecchio has come out with a compilation of his poems, stories and plays titled :“Voices From The Invisible” ( with beautiful artwork from Somerville, Mass. artist Richard Wilhelm). DiVecchio, former Spare Change News poetry editor, has traversed the difficult shoals of political writing; that perilous divide between art and polemic. And more often than not he succeeds. The book starts out with two powerful poems “Earth Song” and “ The Walk Down Newbury Street.” In “Earth Song” DiVecchio reminds the reader in strident and evocative verse of our connection to nature and each other:

“We are the earth, clay, soft, reddish iron/ ashen gray, pungent clear soil!/ We are of earth, sequoia, redwood rooted/ In corn and wheat, with the bones of our ancestors./ We are of salt, ocean, and pitch pine/ The sun’s heat moves within us/ We belong to each other, move together/ need each other.”

In this anthology DiVecchio includes his signature play “Sarah’s Journal” that I had the pleasure to read my poetry in, along with several other bards, at the church at Zero Garden Street in Cambridge, Mass. This play is a poignant piece about an elderly Holocaust survivor’s eviction by a calloused landlord, in the Republic of Cambridge. The play was very germane when it came out because Rent Control had recently ended and many folks were displaced. The play had a run at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education and it was covered in “The Boston Globe,” and “The Cambridge Chronicle.”

In the play “Incident at Starberry’s ( perchance Carberry’s?) DiVecchio uses the conceit of an enraged, hassled waitress to hammer home his point about exploited workers and the dog-eat-dog capitalist society.

DiVecchio. a dyed-in-the -wool feminist uses the theme of the inequality of the sexes in much of his work. DiVecchio’s art has a social mission--perhaps not a commercially prudent move. But DiVecchio remains  true to his purpose in spite of the prevailing wind.

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update