The Year in Poetry 1991

The conflict between the new formalist/new narrative poets and staunch advocates of free verse (what one critic has called, respectively, “newfors” and “freepos”) reflected the larger political world in its de-escalation of hostilities, not in this case, however, due to the complete destabilization of either camp. Evidence from books perused suggests that most poets still write in free verse, although a generous number of “formalist” books were also issued this year. Many predominantly free-verse volumes demonstrate increased attention to the trappings of form, such as regular stanzas and lines that assimilate to a normative meter.

In part, the terms of the conflict may have been changed. In an article published in the May issue of the Atlantic, “Can Poetry Matter?,” Dana Gioia, prominent polemicist for the new formalists, examines the problem in current poetry as a matter of poetry insiders and outsiders. This seems a relabelling of existing camps—with newfors generally equated with outsiders and freepos insiders—yet Gioia does identify a problem: poetry has too much insulated or isolated itself from the “average reader.” One disturbing result is that most volumes examined for this review seemed not only cut from the same cloth but tailored in the same shops from a scant selection of patterns, books by freepos and newfors alike. Too many volumes consist of poems competently crafted but lacking depth, lacking what Donald Hall in “Poetry and Ambition” called higher ambition—the drive not to publish in the right magazines but to write great poems.

This situation affects poetry publication as well. Increasingly, although major commercial houses do maintain a carefully chosen list of poets to show that they remain culturally active, the burden of keeping new poetry in print has fallen to university and independent (small) presses. Ideally, interested and involved individuals would be responsible for publishing poetry; the risk, however, is that editors will be poets trained at the same workshops as those they publish, promoting and perpetuating a narrow sensibility. The truth lies somewhere in the middle ground. Granted, most of what was published by any press reflected competent mediocrity, yet independent presses issued two thirds of the volumes selected for review. They include established publishers like New Directions as well as newer but vital presses like Story Line, and poets range from leading lights like Czeslaw Milosz to first-book authors.

Linda Gregg’s third collection, The Sacraments of Desire, represents the best of what independent presses have issued. Although the work continues to reflect Gregg’s tutelage with Jack Gilbert, few of these poems seem as derivative as those in her first collection, Too Bright To See. These poems, like Gilbert’s, are spare, almost sparse, focusing on what Gilbert calls “real nouns,” names of particular things. The influences are the Greek Anthology and Chinese and Japanese poetry, with their ability to use the most simple things to explore psychological, emotional, and spiritual depths by selecting the fewest necessary details and presenting them in words that, by their very simplicity, resonate with greater significance.

Most of the poems in this volume are short, running a page or less. “Kept Burning and Distant” represents the thrust of her work:

You return when you feel like it,

like rain. And like rain you are tender,

with the rain’s inept tenderness.

A passion so general I could be anywhere.

You carry me out into the wet air.

You lay me down on the leaves

and the strong thing is not the sex

but waking up alone under the trees after.

No adverbs and only two adjectives, and the first of these surprises with its sudden shifting of what may have seemed a fairly conventional metaphor—lover as rain. Yet modifying “tenderness” with “inept” pulls the conceit out of the conventional and also displays a level of distance on the part of the speaker that prepares for the movement of the final line. The twined themes of lust and loneliness run through the book.

The two best poems here are both longer. “My Father and God” is a moving elegy, largely spent describing her father’s extended travels into the desert to watch it blossom after rain. In presenting her father’s view, Gregg defines her own esthetic; she imagines her father,

[lying] on his stomach at sunrise on sand

and stone surrounded by rock and sand. To know distance

and know the close-up. Because he believed it was near

to God. The place nobody wanted. The parts of the world

left alone. The flatness where things are broken down

to the clearest form.

The fragmented lines and sentences characterize her form, a paratactic device conveying the accumulation of details as separate, never fully integrated until they are gathered into the whole the poem makes. This fragmentation both slows the poem by forcing full stops at each period and rushes us through because the fragments are all connected. Rather less fragmentary in style, “Driving to Houston” presents a speaker driving through the American heartland, reflecting on the failures of love in terms of the details of landscape.

Very different is Czeslaw Milosz’s Provinces: Poems 1987-1991 (translated by the poet and Robert Hass), which consists of his typically longer and longer-lined poems and sequences on frankly philosophic themes. Time—”that is, a division into was and will be” (“Creating the World”) and its processes, most particularly aging, shape the book’s principal concerns. The title, in fact, seems to refer, among other things, to human aging, as explored in “A New Province,” where the speaker explores old age, “that country” about which little is known “Till we land there ourselves.” This poem, and many others, wonder what survives the inevitable losses of life; “Poetry will remain after you,” he reminds himself, striving to derive some consolation, “A few verses, durable.” In “At Yale,” a sequence focused largely on painting as a representative art form, he notes of an anonymous painter whose “workshop / Together with all he had painted, burned down,” that “his paintings remain. On the other side of the fire.”

These poems constitute an effort to recover the past through the operation of controlled memory. Milosz writes of a “chronicler” who “tries to describe the earth as he remembers it / I.e., to describe on that earth his first love…” (“Far Away”). In “Return,” the chronicler has become a first-person narrator who in old age “decided to visit places where I wandered long ago in my early youth.” The remembered past, however, is effaced of many details, leaving the speaker “incomprehensibly the same, incomprehensibly different,” asking, “How can it be, such an order of the world—unless it was created by a cruel demiurge?” Yet we saw these same Gnostic creators in the wryly humorous “Creating the World,” where they appeared as “Celestials at the Board of Projects.” This unresolved tension between the comic and tragic provides much of the book’s satisfaction as Milosz attempts to fulfill the calling he defines in the wonderful opening poem, “Blacksmith Shop”: “To glorify things just because they are.”

Whereas Milosz writes from the perspective of old age, Thomas McGrath’s posthumous Death Songs presents the author’s final poems, many written with the knowledge of his impending death. The work here is lyrical, many poems ranging from only two or three to nine or ten lines, displaying an intense connection to the natural world and its spiritual mysteries, as well as the interaction of humans with it. The best of these short poems resemble haiku in their compression of statement and sentiment:

Memory

The wild cries

Fall through the autumn moonlight...

But the geese

Have already gone.

Unfortunately, the book seems to have gathered McGrath’s last work with too little attention to quality; mixed with the stronger lyrics are pieces that seem slight, occasional, or excessively repetitive.

The longer poems, mostly located in the first and third of four sections, reflect McGrath’s radical political leanings. The vision, however, as in the best of his work, is a personalized and humanized politics. For McGrath, as he writes of Ruben Dario, “the soil... / Entered him: from below: and was never wholly lost” (“A Visit to the House of the Poet”). His political commitment grows from his firm sense of the interrelationship of the parts of the planet: nature, agriculture, and human, both private and public. This last idea he explores in “There Is Also a Fourth Body,” the “body” of the outer political world that impinges constantly on the “solidarity” of the third, the private “body” made of a man and woman together.

The fourth section pushes to the foreground poems of departure, a poetic legacy, including poems to the poet’s family, reflections on the state of the world, and a poem to his son, bearing the title “Last Will and Testament,” that demonstrates in its regret that once in his life McGrath took an honest job to save money for his son’s future how he remained the consummate outsider until the end. McGrath’s ability to remain humble in his political convictions and to personalize the universal and universalize the personal mark his strengths. More rigorous editing could have given us this force undiluted.

The private for Mark Doty, an openly gay poet, is also political, though few poems take a directly political approach. In Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, his second collection, desire—even at its most carnal—is the way we struggle toward “the body’s paradise,” an approach to divinity. Doty’s subjects include a sixteen-year-old runaway living in a residential hotel in New York City, the clientele and performers at a seedy gay nightclub, the world revealed through books and artifacts, and, in the poem from which the title comes, an exhibition of patchwork quilts. His dominant theme seems to be the longing to grow beyond our solitude and the many forms that longing takes.

Even poems firmly rooted in autobiography flower outward from that center, including narratives that move away from childhood losses and learning to speak a language of emotional need to the ways we seek shape and significance in sexual exchanges. Yet Doty neither distances himself from his subjects nor, though some poems veer closely, degenerates into apologetics. In “Paradise,” the narrator checks his reminiscence of bathhouse-variety promiscuity to note:

I don’t want to glorify this; the truth is

I wouldn’t wish it on anyone,

though it is a blessing,

when all your life you’ve been told

you’re no one, and you find a way

to be what you have been told,

and it’s all right.

Doty’s poems have a sure narrative quality, braiding detail and situation in language and lines supple yet firm. His forms are loose, poems usually organized into stanzas of fixed length, with considerable enjambment of both line and stanza. At times the poems become a bit prolix, but he manages to balance between the openness of narrative and the stricture of lyric as well as he handles the balance between the personal and the social, the private and the public, desire and divinity.

Despite its title, Richard Jones’ second collection, At Last We Enter Paradise, demonstrates greater interest in the fallen world than lost Eden. The best poems focus on characters and situations apart from the poet or at best tangential to him, particularly the several poems concerning his drowned nephew. In these poems Jones displays a capacity to enter the lives of others and imagine their suffering. The more closely Jones treats his own life, however, the more the clarity of focus blurs, and the poems incline toward self-pity and self-indulgence.

The best of the personal pieces avoid these traps by engaging a more self-deprecatory stance. One of the most successful, “Letter of Recommendation from My Father to My Future Wife,” provides a humorous double portrait. Other nicely handled poems also explore the relationship between father and son, most notably “Back Then,” about work, and “My Father’s Buddha,” which involves a statue the father “stole / during the war from a village / in Burma” and gives to the son:

Now the Buddha sits on my desk,

compassionless, half-smiling,

mindful as I devote myself

to the task within the gift,

to do as my father taught me:

save one thing

and offer it to the morning sun

which sees all things

for what they are.

In this poem and others Jones captures the complexity of human relationship in carefully selected detail. The lines and language, however, too often go slack where greater tension and precision would render experience more sharply.

The private mystery of Sherwood Anderson’s stories colors the poems in Debra Allbery’s first collection, Walking Distance, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. That Allbery was raised in Enterprise, Ohio, Anderson’s hometown, accounts only superficially for the echoes of sensibility; concerns with the landscape and the humans who attempt to find their place in it go deeper than that. The best of Allbery’s poems are extended narratives, though their sequence is never plodding or predictable. She makes poems of recollections often cast in blank verse deftly enough that they call no attention to their craft. Consider the opening stanza of “Produce”:

No mountains or ocean, but we had orchards

in northwestern Ohio, roadside stands

telling what time of summer: strawberries,

corn, apples—and festivals to parade

the crops, a Cherry Queen, a Sauerkraut Dance.

Somebody would block off a street in town,

put up beer tents and a tilt-a-whirl.

The focus on detail to present a picture both visual and social or emotional characterizes her best poems.

Allbery pitches her poems predominantly in the middle range but slides when appropriate into a heightened style or, as in a monologue sequence in the voice of mass-murderer Charles Starkweather, a credibly lower one. This poem, which draws on Starkweather’s letters for details and some recast passages, is particularly notable for its largely successful effort to present Starkweather without either sentimentalizing him (her fellow Ohioan James Wright’s failing) or condescending to him. She manages this same balance in poems that draw more on personal experience, moving from the mundane to the mysterious through sharply drawn details and occasionally startling but apt metaphors.

Philip Levine’s twelfth collection of poems, What Work Is, also deals with the lives of people in the industrial Midwest, lives shaped by the need to work, driven by varieties of poverty. The style is characteristically flattened; lines often follow predictable syntactic breaks, allowing energy to drain from the possible tension between sentence shape and line. For all of that, the best of these poems show a genuine depth of human concern. The title poem, for instance, begins with the speaker standing “in the rain in a long line / waiting....For work,” and seems to take a tack that may be somewhat hostile or condescending to the “educated” reader:

You know what work is—if you’re

old enough to read this you know what

work is, although you may not do it.

From this description of waiting in line, Levine moves to consider the love for a brother “home trying to / sleep off a miserable night shift / at Cadillac so he can get up / before noon to study his German,” which he needs “so he can sing / Wagner, the opera you hate most....” The poem concludes with a surprising shift back to recognize self-failing:

How long has it been since you told him

you loved him, held his wide shoulders,

opened your eyes wide and said those words,

and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never

done something so simple, so obvious,

not because you’re too young or too dumb,

not because you’re jealous or even mean

or incapable of crying in

the presence of another man, no,

just because you don’t know what work is.

The weaker poems demonstrate the same metrical and musical flatness and lack this poetically and humanly elevating discovery and exposition of self, degener-ating at times into the kind of posturing and self-importance this poem avoids.

Like Levine, Lucille Clifton writes poems of personalized politics, focused on the lives of common people. Unlike Levine, however, she avoids the stance of condescending self-importance. At times the poems become a bit too shrill or polemical, but the best poems reflect the quality of common life and art fitted for use suggested by the collection’s title, Quilting: Poems 1987-1990. Clifton employs a minimal style, eschewing upper-case letters and punctuating sparely, yet her control of line and syntax are sharp enough that her sense remains clear; also, she commands more than a single stylistic range, incorporating from the low, middle, and high styles through the volume. We hear street voices, older voices, and the voice of an educated poet, modulated carefully from poem to poem. While weaker poems fall into an easy rhetoric of declaration rather than presentation (“nothing so certain as justice. / nothing so certain as time.”—”february 11, 1990”), the best poems find their way through a delicate music and wry humor. Typical is the third and final section of “from the wisdom of sister brown,” “on the difference between eddie murphy and richard pryor”:

eddie, he a young blood

he see somethin funny

in everythin ol rich

been around a long time

he know aint nothin

really funny

The lines and language capture the values of spoken wisdom.

Stylistically, Brenda Marie Osbey’s third book, the narrative Desperate Circumstance, Dangerous Woman, resembles Lucille Clifton’s poems. She, too, casts her poetry in lower-case letters and with minimal punctuation across lines that derive from the rhythms of black speech, in this instance, Creole dialects from the Treme district of New Orleans. Beyond those essentially superficial resemblances, however, her work avoids the directly political or didactic to stitch a patchwork of voices into an oblique narrative of romantic intrigue obscured by Hoodoo ritual and practice. This results in a dense, richly textured poetry that surrenders sense only through patient reading. Speakers shift from section to section with no introduction or transition, leaving us to piece the whole together as we go, forcing us to reassess and shift perspective constantly. Yet the rewards are worth the struggle, or perhaps the struggle itself becomes part of the reward; we make sense of this world and these relationships through the same processes of accumulation and sorting we use in “real life.”

Osbey’s dense style creates a world both mysterious and realistic. The poem uses the speech of the time and the place; she appends a glossary of ethnic terms and place names, which allows her to set tone and mood without compromising vocabulary and still gives the reader a fair chance, albeit with a little work, to follow. No single passage can present the fullness of her accomplishment, the music of repetition and shifting voices, but this passage from the “Prophecy” section gives some sense of the texture:

it comes to this then:

sacrament

ritual

the casting of nets on muddied waters

the long walk back

bended knees

the taking and giving of blessings.

i was a young woman

and now i am old.

i see the things the young cannot see.

i turn my eyes in on my heart.

don’t let me put my hands to dirt, i pray

don’t let me put my hands to dirt

No less complex is the narrative structure of Stitching Porcelain: After Matteo Ricci in Sixteenth Century China, Deborah Larsen’s book-length sequence based on the life of a Jesuit priest who smuggled himself into China. Larsen draws on various historical accounts and Ricci’s own writings for material but fully translates all that she borrows into a sequence propelled by lyric intensity rather than narrative accumulation. Individual poems refer to events and situations the poet explains in marginal glosses, and endnotes provide further information and references. Such appendices offer an imperfect solution to the problems of the historical or culturally foreign sequence, but they allow poets like Larsen and Osbey to explore their material without compromising the texture of the poem itself or diluting its force with explanation.

Larsen employs a variety of forms in individual pieces, drawn from sources as different as Chinese poetry and the Catholic litany, which reflects the cultural melding of the circumstance. The highpoint of the sequence is the climactic “Blue Lights,” Ricci’s deathbed meditation, borrowing elements of form from another Jesuit, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Wreck of the Deutschland”:

17

Our heart-valves

sough, hesitate, and seal, becoming

instruments of narrow music.

I grow thin on this canal, a form

undone by feldspar, air, and star.

Cast me as an antique server: I’d play to backs

to wake a blank Wanli, the eunuchs,

mandarins; and Her whom, not possessing, my heart loves.

Larsen demonstrates a fine ear for this difficult music, as well as the more subtle music of lyrics modelled on the Chinese. This sequence demonstrates considerable craft and ambition for a first book.

Since the publication of Daily Horoscope, his first collection, Dana Gioia has become the most visible advocate of the new formalism, a stature which has increased pressure for a new collection. Unfortunately, the poems in The Gods of Winter show no development of depth—particularly emotional depth—and display a pervasive slackening of craft. Throughout, most tellingly and damningly in the two long poems that occupy a separate section each, the meter plods, disappointing after the varied caesurae, delicate enjambment, and flexible deployment of stress that characterize the best of his first volume. Here are the opening tercets of “Counting the Children,” the first long narrative:

“This must have been her bedroom, Mr. Choi.

It’s hard to tell. The only other time

I came back here was when I found her body.”

Neither of us belonged there. She lived next door.

I was the accountant sent out by the State

To take an inventory of the house.

When someone wealthy dies without a will,

The court sends me to audit the estate.

They know that strangers trust a man who listens.

The frequent end-stopped lines further hamper fluidity, forcing us to hear the march of every regular line.

If loss of metrical flair were compensated by a gain in depth, the lack would perhaps not be so noticeable. But the poems, particularly the two extended narratives, lack drive and compression. The accountant speaker of the above-mentioned poem demonstrates no particular motivation for his concern with the room full of dolls that operates as central metaphor. The second of the longer efforts, “The Homecoming,” concerns a sociopathic fosterchild who escapes from prison and returns to murder the woman who raised him. The poem is certainly timely; we read daily of the casual atrocities committed against children such as this. But, despite Gioia’s attempt to justify this speaker’s self-insight and formal articulation, the poem fails to convey the full terror of the situation. Interestingly, the most fully realized and emotionally satisfying poem in the book, “Planting a Sequoia,” an elegy for a son who diedsoon after birth, is composed in supple but controlled free verse.

Ironically, for all their polemics, the new formalist/new narrative poets suffer from many of the problems they attribute to free verse poets; the craft, while minimally competent, too often involves predictable rhyme and marching meter, and their work demonstrates, despite rhetorical claims that focus on a more objective narrative structure somehow counters the self-absorption rampant in the personal lyric, little gain in substance and depth.

Perhaps even more than Gioia’s new collection, Frederick Feirstein’s City Life, his fifth collection, exemplifies the discrepancy between polemic and practice. More than half of the volume is devoted to a dramatic poem titled “The Psychiatrist at the Cocktail Party.” Plodding meter and rhyme do nothing to salvage a narrative that fails to elevate the subject matter beyond the level of television melodrama. The sequence unfolds over the course of a New York City cocktail party peopled with all the predictable types: crass businessman, charismatic Central American rebel leader, emotionally hungry and flirtatious women—characters far too stock, even granting satirical intent. The psychiatrist displays little capacity for objective observation, miring himself in several superficially handled intrigues. Feirstein attempts to delineate character by using various stanzaic forms for separate characters, but he lacks stylistic control to differentiate the voices clearly through syntax and vocabulary.

Much more successful in its use of formal elements, David Mason’s first book, The Buried Houses, employs form to present poems that probe emotional life with genuine insight and feeling, rather than for the sake of the verse itself. Elegies, especially for his brother, meditations, poems on historical and mythological themes, and dramatic monologues in deftly modulated voices provide a collection of poems consistent in their accomplishment but diverse in their range.

Mason displays a firm sense of tone and diction, using words with care and never seeming to choose them with an eye toward filling a metrical slot. This results in metered verse that flows with the colloquial elegance of Frost. The poems in imagined voices are as natural and unobtrusive as the lyrics in his “own.” One of the most moving of the poems is the extended narrative monologue “Blackened Peaches,” from which this passage comes:

The black leaves was death, though. I knew for sure

they would take someone. That year Mama died.

That year, while the trees was still all blighted,

Doctor Hale was killed. His horse took a fright

out on Mountainview Road, pulled his buggy

off a bridge, and threw him into the river.

There’s foxes on the road; people suppose

it was the foxes give that horse such a scare.

Without violating speech patterns of the character, Mason creates a rich verbal music and casts it across varied but firmly anchored pentameter lines. Mason’s book, co-winner of the Nicholas Roerich Prize, furthers that award’s reputation for publishing strong first collections.

Michael McFee’s third volume, Sad Girl Sitting on a Running Board, also consists of poems written in unobstrusive form. Like Mason, he uses form to provide an armature for poems that might slide into slackness from the burden of colloquial speech and private recollection. The poems accumulate as a kind of sequence memorializing the poet’s mother through a process of sorting through old photographs after her death and reimagining her life in its complexity, both before the poet’s birth and through his childhood. Too often poems based on photographs become workshop set-pieces, never getting beyond the glossy surface; McFee uses the device, however, to animate the characters and color their world—not the rosy tints of refinished portraits but the chromatic register of the real world, complete with shadings of grief and happiness.

The culmination of McFee’s collection is “Grace,” a long narrative cast in Spencerian stanzas. Set during the end of World War II, it imagines the lives of the mother and her younger sister, including the failure of a marriage, the difficulties of the world, and the complication of the sister’s budding romance with an intellectually inspiring (to her) but married conscientious objector serving nearby. This stanza appears in the final section:

She thinks about the War, a feature movie

shot far from this peaceful border. No one

seems to suffer here, really, not even

those who lose boys. Did it matter who won

such a war? Walt had asked. “We can’t just run

from it,” Lois said, “and nothing can keep

war out of our hearts.” The same dog-day sun

ripens crops and rots corpses, shines on sheep

and bombs. Molly thinks of Walt, gone. She falls asleep.

The weaker poems here tend to be those more centered on the poet than on the remembered and recreated mother, but even they are handled with careful craft.

The Cardinal Heart, R. T. Smith’s fifth full-length collection, gathers newer poems with a selection of poems drawn from earlier chapbooks and limited editions to present the full range of his work. His poems are generally rooted in the South, its landscape and sensibility; the best are not confined by that but spread themselves to concerns as diverse as Native American ritual and history, the life of Emily Dickinson, and a lyric meditation on The Book of Kells. When Smith strays too far from his grounding, the poems—like “Self as Trout” and “Fence”—can seem overly self-conscious and lose his distinct voice. His strengths come from his good ear for the music of the language—a virtue connected with a love of words apart from their value as “Signifiers,” as he notes in the poem of that title—and good eye for revealing detail. Here is the opening of that poem:

Perverse, I contemplate the weather of words.

Anyone else can tell you they matter

not because of pattern

or deep music

or their notorious pasts,

but because they name something, cast a small spell

on things that exist outside us,

or within, as when we say “cold,”

not for the sake of knowing water,

but because we touched it and the temperature transferred.

Other poems grow from observations of the natural world and remembrances of the poet’s grandmothers—but not the trite and sentimental poems that too often grow from these subjects.

Andrew Hudgins departs from markedly Southern subjects in his third book, The Never-Ending, though otherwise the poems return to the manner of his first collection—lyrics inclined toward narrative, cast for the most part in unobtrusively metered lines. As the title suggests, this book takes, as did his first, frankly religious topics as recurrent themes. Gone, however, are the carefully handled and humorous monologues of that first collection; while many of the poems bear his characteristic—and occasionally tonally inappropriate—humor they seem propelled by a more personal impetus.

Interspersed through poems of personal narrative and recollection are poems that take as their subject paintings on the life of Christ. This seems structurally questionable; scattered throughout the collection, they lose energy they might gain from being assembled together. Among the most successful of these, “The Cestello Annunciation” focuses its religious consideration around compositional problems inherent in the painting: how we “frame” questions about spiritual matters metaphorically related to how a painter “frames” a scene.

The most moving poems involve a narrator we’re not discouraged from associating with the poet and his relationships with friends, lovers, and God. “Green Inside the Door” recalls the early days of a marriage, when the couple lived in a basement apartment overrun with mildew, forcing them to remove their possessions out into the yard:

We left wet shattered things

out drying in the sun, returned

to almost barren rooms that reeked of bleach

and slept still holding hands, raw burning hands

that we would not let go. Some books, some chairs,

some knickknacks all survived,

and so did we, my love, but separately.

While also notable, “Praying Drunk” includes, in an otherwise thoughtful poem about the ways the self approaches God, elements of scatological humor that distract from rather than enhance momentum. The final “Psalm Against Psalms” effectively pulls the book’s thematic threads together.

All of the volumes so far reviewed fit comfortably in the “mainstream” of contemporary American poetry: poems of meditation, autobiography, occasion, and unambiguous (if occasionally obscure) narrative sequence. They do not, at least explicitly, raise questions of epistemology or signification, yet these projects have occupied some territory in the poetic landscape since Williams and Stein. Imagism and Objectivism shaped the endeavors of the Black Mountain poets, while Stein and the more extreme aspects of Stevens suggested directions for members of the New York School and, recently, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. The final three volumes under consideration, operating at the margins of the mainstream, specifically address issues of language and consciousness, often exploring those problems for elements of style as well as subject.

Robert Creeley’s Selected Poems gathers, the dust jacket informs us, “200 poems from over four decades”; unfortunately, that brief note constitutes the entirety of the volume’s apparatus. The table of contents does not provide information on dates of original publication. While readers can cross-reference with his early volumes, the Collected Poems, or the acknowledgements to determine that this selection gathers work from volumes published between 1962 and 1989, the task should not be so difficult. Nor does the volume indicate, apart from the table of contents, where poems from one collection give way to those from another. A selected poems serves a distinct critical function: to allow readers to assess the poet’s career; we expect adequate apparatus to aid that endeavor. Likewise, the selection should be rigorous, excluding all but poems that best represent the range and development of the opus. Such is not the case here. The volume sprawls to a hefty, and unjustified, 353 pages of poetry. Much could have been cut. If Thomas Hardy’s poems can be represented in 130 pages, who among contemporary poets rates two to three times the space? Perhaps the practice of allowing poets to assemble their own selected poems needs serious re-examination.

The volume does represent the whole of Creeley’s career, including all the poems we expect to find. The bad news is that both his poetic project and gifts are revealed as exceedingly narrow. Following Williams, he employs line breaks to call attention to the ways language builds, shaping intellection through syntax. His best poems discover a peculiar music, syncopated and often atonal, in their brief lines, contorted syntax, and radical enjambments, tools he employs to explore the process of moving from perception to conception:

Position is where you

put it, where it is,

did you, for example, that

large tank there, silvered,

with the white church along-

side, lift

all that, to what

purpose? How

heavy the slow

world is with

everything put

in place....

(“The Window”)

A poem like this forces us to read slowly—or perhaps reread often, since the enjambment accelerates us through the lines, concentrating on the task of making sense from sentences. Unfortunately, the book reveals that Creeley has not grown from this strong beginning; even the early poems are repetitious, and poems from midway through to the end become increasingly lax and unfocused.

John Ashbery continues to challenge conventions of signification in Flow Chart, his thirteenth book of poems. A single extended poem, like The Prelude and Four Quartets it explores the development of consciousness. That said, however, expect neither the sequential clarity of the former nor the sustained philosophical and lyrical progression of the latter; this book is as frustratingly unyielding and seemingly obscurantic as anything Ashbery has recently published. His chosen task seems to involve the systematic probing and undermining of our accepted notions of how syntax and semantics wed to make easy sense. So, too, this book provides maddening occasions of pronouns that lack apparent referents, words gathered into sentences that parse grammatically but finally refuse to concede logical sense, all composed in lines of musical elegance, even—or especially—when they loosen to seeming slackness.

But this is not to condemn the book; in fact, Ashbery’s “meaning” comes clearer when we realize that, like The Waste Land, the poem is not related from a single point of view or even a progression of clearly delineated speakers. Instead, voices overlap, blend, and mingle to present the cacophony of a mind at work—voices from the media, echoes from literature, the overheard babble of conversation, all weave through to become part of the speech of consciousness. Throughout, Ashbery provides “clues” to his method; this passage occurs early in the poem:

Words, however, are not the culprit. They are at worst a placebo,

leading nowhere (though nowhere, it must be added, can sometimes be a cozy

place, preferable in many cases to somewhere), to banal if agreeable note-spinning.

Covering reams of foolscap with them won’t guarantee success,

yet neither will it automatically induce ruination; wheel on the guillotine;

leave, in the middle distance, something like an endless morgue, a lake of regret.

It is better though to listen to the strange chirps of the furniture.

A single reading will yield passages both perplexing and provocative; ferreting sense requires genuine commitment.

Like Ashbery, Jorie Graham presses the limits of syntax and sense, though her poems avoid the surrealistic humor of Ashbery’s long poem and, despite the length of some of the poems, are more accessible if only because they are lyrics, even if skewed to the verge of obscurity. Region of Unlikeness, her fourth collection, continues her evolution away from the mainstream. Poems begin in personal experience but quickly shift to considerations of how we know what we know and how we find the ways to say it. At their weakest, this can seem almost programmatic; at their best, these poems demonstrate brilliant ease and fluidity, capturing the rhythm of the mind at work, cross-cutting between modes of subjectivity.

The opening poem establishes her method; “Fission” blends recollections of watching a movie, including ways that our perception of cinematic reality keys our own sensory responses and memories, with the announcement by an audience member that JFK has been shot. The propulsive length of her sentences makes excerpting almost meaningless, but notice, apart from the content, how these lines imitate the headlong rush of overtaxed consciousness:

...undressing something there where my

body is

though not my body—

where they play on the field of my willingness,

where they kiss and brood, filtering each other to no avail,

all over my solo

appearance,

bits smoldering under the shadows I make—

and aimlessly—what we call free—there

the immobilism sets in,

the being-in-place more alive than the being....

“Immobilism” is an important concept for Graham—almost a method; her poems grow from moments when the psyche works so furiously that it draws all energy and renders us, like Wordsworthian “spots of time,” out of normal chronological flow.

The best of these poems engage us in the process of thinking; yet at times we can wonder whether the method exceeds what can be expected of even highly erudite readers. Endnotes inform us that many of the poems include deliberate misquotations of authors as diverse as Emily Dickinson and Nietszche, all unmarked in the text. Here a little compromise might be in order; even Eliot provided extensive notes to indicate where and how he alluded or altered. Pushed to this limit, few readers will be able—or even willing to try—to make sense of Graham’s efforts, and sense does seem part of her intent. Among the best offerings are “Manifest Destiny,” “The Phase after History,” “Who Watches from the Dark Porch,” “Spring,” and “The Region of Unlikeness,” which opens by evoking the confusion of an adolescent girl waking in a strange room beside unidentified breathing; it continues:

Don’t wake up. Keep this in black and white. It’s

Rome. The man’s name...? The speaker

thirteen. Walls bare. Light like a dirty towel.

It’s Claudio. He will overdose before the age of

thirty someone told me time

ago....

Fragmentary where the earlier passage sprawled, these lines display Graham’s ability to adjust syntax and diction to mimic the particular psychological flow. Note, too, how she registers the seamless shift in intellection between memory and commentary, image and analysis. This collection marks a significant talent defining its place.