With five children constantly yelling and fighting and a husband whose first words out of his mouth every evening after dinner were “What’s for dessert?”, Eliana often felt unappreciated and taken for granted.

In later years, as a widow, she recounted those early married years and revealed “There came a day when I felt I could not go on.  No one appreciated all the hard work I was doing for them.  No one ever said thank you or asked how I was doing or what I needed.  I swear, that day if there had been a shotgun in the house, I would have locked myself in the bedroom and blown my brains out.  I have no doubt of it.  That is why, today, I am so opposed to guns in a house, especially around a young mother.  I don’t know how I managed to get through those years, raising five children, putting breakfast, dinner, and dessert on the table for a family of seven every day, doing laundry with a wringer washer, sewing all the children’s clothes, and then, also, holding down a job.”

As all but her youngest child left home, Eliana entered her most introspective era of writing and enrolled in graduate creative writing classes at Ohio University.  Having survived young motherhood and matured as both parent and poet, she collected thirty years of poetry in In Courtrooms of the Mind (2000).  This is her most serious and ambitious poetry, containing profound inner ruminations on love, suicide, disappointment, and isolation.  With her sense of survival, she juxtaposes dark poems of despair with ones of beauty, purpose, hope, and wisdom.    She comes to terms with life.  The style of these poems reflects Eliana's mastery of her craft:  extended metaphors with strict rhyme and meter.

She even experimented with free verse, but her masterpiece as a creative, yet disciplined poet is A Crown of Sonnets:  For Marinella, dedicated to her mother who immigrated from Italy at age 18. This 98-line poem celebrates her Italian heritage and employs the style of an Italian sonnet which differs in rhyming pattern from a Shakespearian sonnet. A "crown of sonnets” consists of seven sonnets that tell a story.  The last line of each sonnet is repeated as the first line in the next sonnet.  The final line of the last sonnet repeats the first line of the first sonnet.   Following A Crown of Sonnets are poems drawn from the experiences of a mature woman who now has time to reflect upon her life.

Eliana’s younger sister, Elaine, describes her sister’s writing:

“I feel this is Eliana’s most impressive collection of poetry.   In this book she has written some profound, elegantly-worded poetry, some of it very sad and dark, that is beautiful.  Her poem written for our mother Marinella still makes me cry when I read it.”

Most of the poems in In Courtrooms of the Mind were written late at night.  In spite of working a fulltime job, Eliana often stayed up until the first blush of dawn to capture an idea incubating in her head.  In her poem 3:00 AM she uses the metaphor of knitting to describe her mind’s self-recriminations:

The needles of the mind knit and purl,
Purl and knit, reclothing marionettes
In yarns unravelled from a dusty barrel
Of shabby costumes.  Out of ifs and buts
The needles recreate slipped loops and knots;
Tangled breath in the second act of speaking
Forgettable lines; A yarned-out filigree
Disordering time, clicking, ticking
With bad reviews, mish-mash, and debris.
Needles, drop your work and let me be!
What's done is done, and though you try forever,
You can't undo one knot beyond forgiving
Nor reblock a rigid form; and once over
Is too often for certain acts of living.

This collection of poetry will inspire you when you feel you cannot go on.  These poems inform you that someone else can fathom the hidden recesses of your soul.  Through her poetry, Eliana shares with us her struggle to conquer depression, reconcile dreams deferred, and move toward grace and wisdom.  Shadow and Stone, about becoming a widow at age 54, was first published by the reputable Beloit Poetry Journal following her husband's fatal heart attack after 31 years of marriage.  The poem ends thus:

I turn to stone, endure
The trickeries of light, and face
My shadowed place
In stony peace.

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Sample poems from In Courtrooms of the Mind (2000)

• Shadow and Stone, published in Beloit Poetry Journal, 1970
• A Crown of Sonnets:  for Marinella
• Lost
• 3:00 AM