The process of reading most volumes of poetry published in the
Two collections of essays by accomplished poets speak to this situation. Given the much-publicized bickering between new formalists and dedicated “free verse” writers, we might not expect frequent agreement between Dana Gioia and Denise Levertov, yet their essays, which address a wide variety of problems involving contemporary poetry, occupy extensive common ground.
The centerpiece of Gioia’s selection is his hotly discussed 1991 essay which gives the volume its title, Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture. Additionally, “Notes on the New Formalism” and “The Poet in an Age of Prose” provide cogent insights into the state of the art; Gioia’s assessments in these essays are buttressed by the incisive analyses he displays in treatments of individual poets as diverse as Wallace Stevens, Weldon Kees, and Ted Kooser, among others. Gioia reads poems with both acuity and sensitivity; his ear rarely errs. While clearly partisan in the debate over the use of form, Gioia articulates convincing arguments for broadening our poetic base; in “The Dilemma of the Long Poem,” he speculates how an intelligent eighteenth-century reader might respond to our claims for the “scope and diversity” of contemporary American poetry:
His overall reaction, I suspect, would be a deep disappointment over the predictable sameness, the conspicuous lack of diversity in what he read. Where are the narrative poems, he would ask, the verse romances, ballads, hymns, verse dramas, didactic tracts, burlesques, satires, the songs actually meant to be sung...? The panoply of available genres would seem reduced to a few hardy perennials that poets worked over and over again with dreary regularity—the short lyric, the ode, the familiar verse epistle, perhaps the epigram, and one new-fangled form called the “sequence,” which often seemed to be either just a group of short lyrics stuck together or an ode in the process of falling apart.
The acerbic wit as well as the scathing judgement are typical. And while some might argue with individual points (no lesser a poet than Yeats often worked in the “sequence” to powerful effect), much of our strong reaction against Gioia’s scorn results, I suspect, from defensiveness and denial.
Denise Levertov’s New & Selected Essays gathers nine essays published in her two previous volumes of essays together with sixteen newer ones, grouping earlier with more recent essays in clusters concerning the work of William Carlos Williams, poetic technique, the place of the poet in the world, and her own spiritual growth as reflected in her work. Her essays on Williams’ work underscore the problems of intelligent poetry criticism in this country; she undertakes in “On Williams’ Triadic Line” to correct several generations of critics’ misreadings of Williams’ prosody. Her essays concerning technique also address the impoverished condition of poetic awareness and the need for greater clarity concerning such essential technical matters as the line. “Not only hapless adolescents,” she writes in “On the Function of the Line,” “but many gifted and justly esteemed poets writing in contemporary nonmetrical forms, have only the vaguest concept, and the most haphazard use, of the line.” Yet, she stresses, the line “is a tool, not a style.” Her essays are guided by a vision of “aesthetic ethics,” a pervasive sense that “artistic quality...[is] bound up with artistic integrity.” Shaped by this ideal, they provide a firm guide for our readings in contemporary poetry.
This year’s most significant publication is Hayden Carruth’s Collected Shorter Poems. For too long Carruth suffered the lack of a consistent publisher; as a result, much of his best work has gone unnoticed or too little noticed. Notable in a volume as diverse as this are Carruth’s monologues and poems about characters delivered in lines that echo their speech; as the speaker in “John Dryden” notes, “have you noticed / I can’t talk about him without talking like him?” Like Frost, Carruth captures a sense of character and place while subtly presenting a complex set of meanings, discovering the kind of “natural symbol” ordinary people grapple with to understand their lives. One of the most powerful, “Marvin McCabe,” is a monologue by an inarticulate speaker whose friend “Hayden” acts as amanuensis for the poem. Marvin McCabe details his upbringing and the accident that left him incapacitated—able to think but not talk. The credible voice, by turns bitter and accepting, builds through tonal control to a powerful conclusion:
Sometimes I sit
here in this bay window and look out
at the field, the hills, the sky, and I see the boulders
laughing, holding their sides and laughing,
and the apple trees shaking and twisting with laughter,
the sky booming and roaring, the whole earth
heaving like a fat man’s belly, everything
laughing. It isn’t because we’re a joke, no,
it’s because we think we aren’t a joke—that’s
what the whole universe is laughing at. It makes
no difference if my thoughts are spoken or not,
or if I live or die—nothing will change.
How could it? This body is wrong, a misery,
a misrepresentation, but hell, would talking make
any difference? The reason nobody knows me
is because I don’t exist. And neither do you.
Other poems in this mode include “Johnny Spain’s White Heifer,” “Lady,” “Marshall Washer,” and “Regarding Chainsaws.”
Carruth’s lyrics display a range of diction and vocabulary which allows him to modulate easily from low to high style and to incorporate moments of humor in otherwise serious, even solemn poems without violating that tone. As in the following passage from “Once More,” his lyrics often derive from careful observation of the natural world, not merely to see things but to consider, as he writes in “The Ravine,” “relationships of things”:
Once more by the brook the alder leaves
turn mauve, bronze, violet, beautiful
after the green of crude summer; galled
stems, pithy, tangled, twist in the
flesh-colored vines of wild cyclamen.
Mist drifts below the mountaintop
in prismatic tatters....
Typically, Carruth presents his observations through details objective enough to allow us to “see” the situation yet in language that renders the emotional construct of the subject.
The later poems in the volume, following Carruth’s move to Syracuse, New York, in 1979, shift not only idiom and locale, as in Asphalt Georgics, a group of poems written in syllabic ballad stanzas employing frequently hyphenated enjambments, but open up very different poetic territory in the Whitmanesque-lined and loopingly discursive poems from Tell Me Again How the White Heron Rises and Flies Across the Nacreous River at Twilight Toward the Distant Islands. The first of these laments the passing of the agrarian lifestyle that provided the basis for traditional georgics while celebrating the persistence of human life amid suburban sprawl that threatens that spirit. The strategies of apparent tangent and indirection Carruth uses to build these poems evolves into structures, in the second, which accumulate like jazz riffs and motifs: they seem to diverge wildly from the “point” of the poem only to swoop around at the end to enlarge the idea of point. Unfortunately, the newest poems are not consistent; both the selections from the late Sonnets and the section of new poems are less fully achieved.
Finally, a collected poems provides a perspective on a poet’s career. And this volume demonstrates what some readers have long known: Hayden Carruth possesses greater range of style, scope of subject, and diversity of formal skills than any other poet working in the
Gary Snyder’s No Nature is billed as New and Selected Poems, yet the generosity of selection suggests that the process was closer to that of a collected rather than a selected volume. Snyder’s greatest accomplishment is his ability to hew to a chosen subject matter and style yet discover means to broaden and enlarge the approach. His style—a combination of language, line, and informing attitude—has changed little from the poem gathered in Riprap to the newest poems in this collection. (One complaint about the volume’s apparatus: nowhere are initial publication dates of original books available; even the copyright page is of little use.) In fact, those first poems, including Snyder’s versions of the poems of Han Shan, are among the strongest in the collection. Here, the influence of Chinese poetry and Kenneth Rexroth make for concise, evocative descriptions of places and people, in which commentary is kept to a minimum. “Hay for the Horses,” one of the strongest, recounts a nameless worker’s trip “From far down San Joaquin / Through Mariposa, up the / Dangerous mountain roads” to deliver hay, ending, as he shares lunch with a narrator whose presence is restricted to distanced presentation, with these lines in the worker’s words:
“I’m sixty-eight,” he said,
“I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought, that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that’s just what
I’ve gone and done.”
This simplicity of presentation eludes Snyder through poems in the middle period, where the influence of Pound, with a layering of counter-cultural preachiness, becomes more dominant. The poems from his 1983 collection, Axe Handles, come closest to returning to this clarity of voice, particularly the title poem, which concerns Snyder’s realization, as he shows his son how to make a handle for a hatchet, that the wisdom of an Oriental master, “First learned from Ezra Pound”—”’In making the handle / Of an axe / By cutting wood with an axe / The model is indeed near at hand’“—applies precisely to the rearing of his own children. This volume contains enough of these gems to rank Snyder as an important journeyman in contemporary poetry.
While we expect a certain amount of weeding when a poet prepares a volume of collected poems (not the same as “complete,” which should include all work gathered in books as well, perhaps, as previously uncollected poems and even juvenilia), a selected poems should result from a very different process of inclusion. Last year in this space I complained about the lack of both apparatus and rigor in Robert Creeley’s Selected Poems; this year’s raft of selected poems prompts another cavil regarding such volumes. A selected poems should, first and foremost, be justified by a poet’s maturity (older than fifty) and stature; success over the long haul seems reasonable warrant. Beyond that, extreme rigor should be exercised: weed and prune, then go at it again, leaving the representative best, period. Galway Kinnell and Hayden Carruth have produced models of what a selected poems can be; theirs weigh in at 148 and 165 pages, respectively, and Carruth, in particular, is a prolific writer. Finally, because a selected volume garners the best, poets should resist the impulse to include new work side by side with old. The new work, however strong, has not survived the acid tests of time and critical evaluation; a selected volume, at its best, serves a specific function, and that does not include testing fresh work.
By these criteria, William Matthews’ Selected Poems and Translations, 1969-1991 ranks highest of the volumes surveyed, failing only the test of length. The selections from newer volumes are more generous than from his earliest, which is to be expected; poets should grow. The selection confirms that Matthews possesses greater wit and intelligence than most of his contemporaries in what David Dooley calls the “Interregnum generation.” This selection also suggests that Matthews’ strengths are rarely well served by the way he chooses to cast his poems. From his earliest collection, Ruining the New Road (1970), Matthews’ poems most often employ the accepted period style such as it evolved from spindly poems with an au courant politically tinged surrealism, through the prose poems and one-liners that mark his second collection, to the increasingly wider lines and stanzaic forms in his more recent volumes. The flat rhythms and throw-away enjambments that characterize academic poetry in the seventies and eighties are not the best vehicles for an epigrammatic and formal wit; sharp wit requires equally sharp articulation, the way Auden wrapped his wit in masterfully poised rhymes and meters.
Matthews’ early poems, when they free themselves of cute, neo-surrealist flourishes, seek to reveal the mystery contained in the mundane, a calling that attracted him to the work of Jean Follain, a selection of whose prose poems (translated with Mary Feeney) are included. Yet even his treatment of themes involving childhood, the pleasures of company, and pervasive loneliness, find fuller treatment in later volumes. Flood (1982) contains the moving lyric consideration of life among the divorced, “Good Company,” which begins:
At dinner we discuss marriage.
Three men, three women (one couple
among us), all six of us wary.
“I use it to frighten myself.”
Our true subject is loneliness.
We’ve been divorced 1.5 times
per heart. “The trick the last half
of our lives is to get our work done.”
The strongest work occurs in his most recent collection, Blues If You Want (1989), which shows Matthews testing the waters of metrical verse. Many poems use rhymes, not quite irregular enough to be accidental but not yet with applied consistency, and two extended monologues in the voice of jazz musicians approach blank verse. These poems, “Every Tub” and “Straight Life,” employ extended narration in a way new to his work. We might not completely believe that we’re hearing unedited commentary by black musicians, but Matthews gets the tone and details right, and we can believe that Matthews’ imagination has won over new territory.
Like Matthews, Stephen Berg has seemed a representative Interregnum voice, yet his New & Selected Poems shows off an under-appreciated talent. The selection from four previously published collections contains some poems cut from period cloth, but even his early work shows an affinity for a long line and a depth of emotional probing unusual in a generation of poets too often willing to settle for surface effects. Both “Sister Ann,” with its sprawling Whitmanesque lines, and “Desnos Reading the Palms of Men on Their Way to the Gas Chambers” exceed cataloguing to inhabit worlds of suffering. Several poems from his second collection, Grief (1975), confront the poet’s despair concerning not only his father’s suffering and death but his own inadequacy—or the language’s—to articulate his grief, as in the concluding lines of “What I Wanted to Say”:
The streetlamps glow with a sudden brightness,
you feel satisfied with the cracked chimneys,
the dull orange haze blowing across the stars,
you could sit endlessly on the steps, smoking,
doing nothing, and never speak again.
But this isn’t what I wanted to say.
The birds were calling me, I think. Or someone.
There were tears. I stumbled. My jaws ached.
I bent over my sleeping children to say goodbye
and each one turned to me and smiled. But this
came back—your dead face was a blank white
flower opening in me, which I couldn’t touch.
I stood somewhere, saying, “Nobody can say this.”
Notice how the end-stopped lines prevent the rhythm from building, keeping the pace steady, somber, accumulating its effect so that we pause, weighting even the final “this” of the only completely enjambed line in the passage.
The final third of this volume is a selection of newer poems, including a group of prose pieces from a work-in-progress, Shaving. Here, the newer work seems included after considerable weeding, and is justified if only because of the power of the final poem, “Homage to the Afterlife,” published as a limited edition. This extended poem, owing more to Ginsberg’s remaking of the Whitman line than to Whitman himself, gathers force through its anaphoric refrain, “Without me.” Individual “lines,” ranging from a few words to nearly two pages in length, drive us with their accumulation yet force us to read carefully because Berg utilizes asyntactic composition to represent the logic of associative thought, delving into anger and fear surrounding parental loss and rejection conflated with a first, defining sexual encounter. A brief passage cannot capture the poem’s force, but these lines give a taste:
Without me, the doctor answers my pleading question Why did she hate me so much with Because you exist
Without me, but that is not the story it’s beyond not in details memories feelings washed up into the present by the wounds struggles to understand survive walk talk eat work sleep and in between the story
Without me, wanting to understand wanting to get rid of who we are what’s happened to us and not act can’t have accept can’t accept
Details accrue slowly, through repetition; the poem attempts to unfold the ways in which we simultaneously seek to hide from and reveal the things that hurt and grace us most powerfully.
We might first ask why Tom Clark’s Sleepwalker’s Fate: New and Selected Poems, 1965-1991 was necessary. Born in 1941,
If at times we wish Julia Randall’s The Path to Fairview: New and Selected Poems, which gathers work from her six previous collections, were a bit shorter, it is not because line by line the poems lack craft, intelligence, erudition, and even humor; rather, while her craft has developed since her first volume was issued in 1952, style and subject from the earliest poems resemble those from the sampling of new work. Randall writes about nature and the place of humans in it, whether backyard gardens or woodland, but nature imbued with something beyond the purely natural or human, suggesting something of the divine. And Randall knows more about nature underfoot than most of us, as evidenced in these lines from “The Banana Tree at Carney”:
I asked the audience what they found obscure
about my work, and one said,
“Words like sycamore.”
I wouldn’t try paulownia on him
though they’re so common in the Shenandoah
I cropped some pods for Mother, coming home
one Christmas, thinking
how nice they’d look on the mantel, but as usual
with what an adult daughter brings,
my mother said, “What the hell are these things?”
Somewhat peculiar is her tendency to break regular meter and use, as above, occasional strict rhyme, a habit that spans her career. If the book occasionally drags, continued reading yields frequent pleasure.
Much less rewarding is Mary Oliver’s New and Selected Poems, winner of the 1992 National Book Award. Arranged in reverse chronology, this selection exemplifies critic Sven Birkerts’ complaint regarding this practice: “If...the poet has declined, then the arrangement scarcely serves his or her best interests—though, admittedly, when that’s the case any policy other than self-censorship is a bad one” (The Electric Life 197). The earliest poems in this over-long volume show a promising talent for detail and lines whose rhythms build at least minimal tension, as in this passage from “A Letter from Home”:
Here where my life seems hard and slow,
I read of glowing melons piled
Beside the door, and baskets filled
With fennel, rosemary, and dill,
While all she could not gather in
Or hide in leaves, grows black and falls.
The tendency for line breaks over-emphasized by syntactical units could, with work, be vitalized to allow more variation, and the ability to envision these particulars could be expanded to a net to gather in more of the world. Such, however, was not the path Oliver chose.
She has developed a characteristic line that is brief and even more determined by syntax, and her eye for detail, still focused on the natural world, too often imposes a false, sentimental tint on what she imagines. Like Roethke, whose view of natural minutiae involved exploration of the self, Oliver’s true subject in these poems is herself, but without Roethke’s deep psychological probing; she seems satisfied with seeing something just closely and accurately enough we will likely commend her on her sensitivity, however imprecise the image. Take, for example, these lines from “Lilies”: “I think I will always be lonely / in this world, where the cattle / graze like a black and white river...” I have watched many grazing herds of cattle, and their movement has never struck me as resembling the fluidity of water—nor does it after reading these lines. The opening stanza of this same poem (which one reviewer has singled out for praise), displays her too-typical slack lineation:
I have been thinking
about living
like the lilies
that blow in the fields.
The lines clunk predictably down at the end of the first convenient syntactical unit. This would make for dull prose, laden with prepositional phrases that bury the natural energy of the sentence. Pound demanded that poetry be at least as well written as prose; these days we need to add, “good prose.”
Honoring such tepid verse seems the more perverse considering the mastery displayed by at least three of the other four nominees: Carruth’s Collected Shorter Poems, Gary Snyder’s No Nature, and Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris (reviewed later), each of which takes nature as a primary subject and treats it with greater fidelity of observation, depth of feeling, and felicity of craft. Until whatever passes for a poetry establishment can recognize quality of thought, feeling, and craft as they work together to inform a body of work, American poetry will be marked by the preponderance of the trivial.
Finally, the publication of Muriel Rukeyser’s poems in Out of Silence: Selected Poems makes available work which was allowed to go out of print by her commercial publishers. Perhaps because so many of her contemporaries achieved such high levels of accomplishment and notoriety, Rukeyser’s work has suffered neglect. Her work does not display the consistent mastery or polish of Lowell or Roethke, nor does it usually display the near-histrionic idiosyncrasies of Berryman or the reserved craft of Bishop, but her range and attack equal and surpass, for instance, Stanley Kunitz and Jarrell. Her work, from its earliest, seeks to merge traditional prosody with lessons learned from Modernist masters like Williams. Her poems often seek to create a mythology of the self, drawing on classical gods and heroes as well as a sense of archetypal pattern. These lines open the third section of the title poem from Waterlily Fire (1962):
Many of us Each in his own life waiting
Waiting to move Beginning to move Walking
And early on the road of the hill of the world
Come to my landscapes emerging on the grass
The stages of the theatre of the journey
Other subjects lend themselves to her radical political sentiments, often at the expense of the work; we do not appreciate enough that poetry which allows its politics to slide into propaganda, however well-intentioned, is no more savory than work which allows emotion to blur into sentimentality. This tendency is exaggerated by the editorial decision to resurrect Rukeyser as a political poet and feminist, too often overlooking the more delicate lyrics. For all that, Rukeyser’s work deserves redeeming, and her editor Kate Daniels has done her justice.
Another notable restoration is Christopher MacGowan’s painstakingly edited and annotated edition of William Carlos Williams’
A book-length poem in the Williams-Pound mold, Peter Dale Scott’s Listening to the Candle: A Poem on Impulse is the second volume of a projected trilogy. Like Paterson and The Cantos, it includes references to and quotations from a variety of sources: philosophical, religious, political, and poetic; unlike its precursors, it cites sources in the wide margins and appends a ten-page bibliography. Quotations from foreign languages are also marginally glossed. The quotations amplify and extend the personal references—the poem’s primary subject seems the development of personality refracted through memory—to demonstrate the kind of composite “the life of the mind” is. Another theme, underscored by the telescoping references, is the difficulty of embodying understanding in language; this passage occurs toward the end:
even the sutras say
Go beyond language Bodhidharma 44
and if the excitement of childhood
is now elusive
at least to put irony behind us
and so deeply inhabit
the night’s silences...
At times the lines lack fluidity, but the poem’s scope and intelligence propel us through the more prosaic patches.
In Iris, Mark Jarman undertakes a very different kind of book-length poem, both homage to Robinson Jeffers and exploration of how his tragic vision provides a centering focus for one woman. At the outset of the poem, the eponymous heroine, a native Kentuckian who dropped out of college after she became pregnant by a fellow student she met in the course which introduced her to Jeffers, returns home with her young daughter after leaving her abusive husband. Jarman presents the rural Southern milieu credibly and handles the ensuing violence (her brothers’ primary cash crop is marijuana, and they are murdered while Iris and her daughter are away from the house) with care, neither sparing detail nor wallowing in it. Following this, Iris, who has nourished a quiet passion for Jeffers since that college course—finding, if not comfort, a more expansive world view in his lines—takes her daughter and mother on a quest across the continent to Jeffers country, the rugged
“...You’d think with all the death in it, my life
Would be a tragedy. But I’ve kept my real life a secret—reading Jeffers
And trying to imagine him imagining someone like me....”
This ambitious undertaking suffers primarily from the constant comparison to Jeffers. Jarman’s long-lined poem deliberately recalls Jeffers, but the diction is less elevated, the rhythm more relaxed, the syntax less fevered. While this makes for easier reading than Jeffers, this diminution signals a similarly diminished vision, the breadth of perspective deriving from the reference to Jeffers rather than any intrinsic quality of the poem itself. As the passage above suggests, Iris’ life aspires to tragedy, the mainspring of the most powerful of Jeffers’ poems, but the best she seems capable of—perhaps the best most of us, people and poets alike, are capable of these days—is merely melodrama flavored by the hope of something higher.
Shorter and more lyrical in its approach, Brendan Galvin’s Saints in Their Ox-Hide Boat recounts the voyage of St. Brendan the Navigator, the sixth century Irish abbot, and his small crew of Brothers who, according to conjecture, make their way to North America well ahead of Columbus. St. Brendan’s voyage, a “blue martyrdom” to separate himself from worldly interruptions the better to contemplate God, was the source of considerable fancy; Galvin’s poem imagines St. Brendan narrating his account to a young monastic scribe, needing constantly to curb his embroidery:
Don’t mis-hear an old man and set it down
that we came across souls out there.
They were as surely seals as those
radiant blobs we sometimes plowed
our way through in the dark were jellyfish,
not souls. Seals, I said, not souls.
Galvin’s diction seeks a middle ground between contemporary usage and a style designed to suggest an older and decidedly Irish locution. This works well for him on the whole, allowing him latitude enough to pitch toward lyric highs while not preventing the necessary and deflating humor. The breadth and depth fall short of what Jarman aims for in Iris, but Galvin’s tauter line and greater compression of detail may sustain more consistently.
Brenda Hillman’s brief Death Tractates, her fourth collection, focuses on the poet’s process of grief following the loss of her closest female mentor. This sequence interrupted, a note informs us, the manuscript Hillman had been working on and finally took shape as a separate volume. Elegies are a staple of world poetry, often among the most profoundly moving poems in any language. Hillman, however, does not engage the elegiac convention directly; rather, her poems, rooted in gnostic lore, attempt to grapple transparently with the process of wrenching deep sorrow into language. The untitled central poem in the book begins:
—So the poem is the story of the writing of itself.
In the white tent of the psyche
or out there in the normal fog:
the mockingbird all spring:
she looked just like a note herself,
each bit of music slipping past her
till it stopped—
each time one note missing;
it wasn’t exactly failure on her part,
she just needed something to do tomorrow.
Same thing with the poem....
She concludes:
You had to be willing to let it through the sunshine
error of your life,
be willing not to finish it—
Many of the poems, like this one, open with a dash, and all end with one, underscoring the sense of the poems forcing themselves onto paper and the idea of the inherent incompleteness of the attempt.
Most of the poems manage a comfortable juxtaposition of commonplace imagery—supermarkets, backyard birds, libraries—with more abstract meditations on the various possibilities of the afterlife, for Hillman never doubts that the soul continues. The style, too, is an odd mix of standard syntax and punctuation that occasionally breaks down, perhaps under the pressure of expression, into less conventional forms. The voice of the poems is unabashedly personal, leaving little doubt that this is no contrived persona grappling with theoretical poetic problems. When she writes in “Split Tractate” that, even in her sorrow, she held onto “the problem / with pronouns,” we see this in the shift from “I” to a “you” that is clearly the object of self-address rather than the easy avoidance of self-reference popular among too many poets. While these devices seem occasionally labored (particularly the use, almost always following an enjambment, of “What” as a catch-all term for the unknown), the poems accumulate with surprising force.
If Brenda Hillman’s poems are characterized by restraint, Tess Gallagher’s poems surrounding the death of her husband, the fiction writer Raymond Carver, gathered in Moon Crossing Bridge, her sixth collection, seem too often lush, orchestral arrangements heavy on the strings. The volume opens promisingly with “Yes,” a poem similar in its austerity to the work of Linda Gregg:
Now we are like that flat cone of sand
in the garden of the Silver Pavilion in
designed to appear only in moonlight.
Do you want me to mourn?
Do you want me to wear black?
Or like moonlight on whitest sand
to use your dark, to gleam, to shimmer?
I gleam. I mourn.
The ending is not pushed; the emotions build through restraint to the final twist: however much the darkness of death may permit love to gleam, that light cannot be a shimmer. Unfortunately, the remainder of the book does not live up to this promise. While moments in the book achieve beautiful insights into the process of mourning—like the speaker in “Paradise” rubbing oil into the feet of her deceased lover “because it is hard to imagine at first / that the dead don’t enjoy those same things they did / when alive”—too often the poems descend into what seems self-congratulation; this poem continues, “And even if it happened only as a last thing, it / was the right last thing.” Hillman never presumes to judge her mourning so consistently favorably. At almost twice the length of Hillman’s volume, Moon Crossing Bridge might have served subject and reader better had greater rigor been exercised in selection.
The themes of death and grieving recur in The Father, Sharon Olds’ fourth collection. These poems examine the processes explicitly, clinically, seemingly motivated by the conviction, apparent in her earlier books, that truth is best approximated through sparing none of the sordid or embarrassing details. Many such details are keenly observed and register the intended emotional color. When details are recycled from poem to poem, however, vivid supporting notes become washed and finally pallid when they recur as central images. The poems also display a good ear for an effective line, but they accumulate predictably; her formal sense entertains little variety. Most distractingly, perhaps, Olds’ use of metaphor deteriorates with alarming frequency, as when she writes of her father after learning that his death is imminent in “Wonder”:
When he sickened, he began to turn to us,
when he sank down, he shined. I lowered my
mouth to the glistening tureen of his face
and he tilted himself toward me, a dazzling
meteor dropping down into the crib...
The rapid telescoping of time, from the speaker in the present bending to kiss the father to the flash memory of him bending toward her in her crib, is nicely accomplished; but the shift in metaphor from “tureen” to “meteor” is so mixed that it startles us out of the poem to wonder how something this dreadful ever made it through the final cut. This lack of editorial rigor appears as well in her inability, as in Gallagher’s volume, to prune the weaker poems, to conserve images from poem to poem rather than squandering the effect.
Whereas The Father renders a world-view both personal and secular in common speech, A Gilded Lapse of Time, Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s third collection, presents a vision steeped in history, pervaded by religious intricacy, and decorated with elevated diction and syntax. The volume consists of three long poems, concerned with the web of relations among history, God, love, poetry, creation, and death, explored through the occasion of a visit to Dante’s tomb; artistic renderings of scenes from the Passion; and a meditation on the life and death of Osip Mandelstam. Schnackenberg’s vision rarely descends to the simply personal, though the first poem seems to derive from a feeling of loss of love and the attempt to regain it. Imagining Dante wandering the Wood of the Suicides in the fourteenth section, she writes:
And as for me, once I had seen that seeping
At the root of that outcry, I kept to myself,
Afraid that if I spoke, my tongue would
Touch those mutilated words, I was afraid
That if I spoke, I would taste blood....
Through her exchange with Dante, the speaker seems to hope to regain a sense of how poetry, informed by love, translates the world; she concludes this section noting that what she would say regarding these suicides she “heard / when [she] thought poetry was love, and [she] had / Sickened of poetry.”
While not metered or rhymed with any regularity, Schnackenberg’s lines are highly wrought; the syntax is long and elaborate, though accumulation rather than subordination characterizes the build. The language itself is dense, consciously poetic and highly referential; few readers, however erudite, will make sense of these poems without frequent recourse to the appended notes. The driving motive of the poems, in fact, seems more the desire to create beautiful artifacts of language than to penetrate to the depths of any truth; she has far too much fun exploring the gilded nooks and crannies of speech and line to derail the process into a more incisive approach. She herself seems to write in that perfect time she imagines for Mandelstam,
when poetry will be filled
With a peripheral fleet of swans
Glimpsed in the heavy, carved mirrors
That bring the willow park
With its long, statue-ringed, green ponds
Through the windowpane
Into the drawing room...
(“A Monument in Utopia,” 1)
Given such richly accomplished splendor and seriousness of purpose, we might easily lose ourselves enough not to notice—or particularly care—that the beautiful means often seem an end in themselves.
Less intoxicated by her own verbal facility, Louise Glück explores the complex relationship between God, humans, and the natural world with startling emotional depth in The Wild Iris, her sixth collection. Far from the strained and occasionally awkward lines and language of her previous books, these poems strive for and usually master an elegant lyricism in the imagined voices of wildflowers; of God manifest in wind, light, and changing seasons; and of a woman who struggles to find evidence of God while laboring in a garden in a cold climate. In poems most often titled “Matins” and “Vespers,” the human voice expresses fear, frustration, and love, while “checking / each clump for the symbolic / leaf” in the garden and entertaining the apprehension that God, the addressed “you” of these poems, “exist[s] / exclusively in warmer climates....” Plants, most often wildflowers, counter these prayers, presenting a view more eternal for the accelerated brevity of their lives. Here is “Scilla” in its entirety:
Not I, you idiot, not self, but we, we—waves
of sky blue like
a critique of heaven: why
do you treasure your voice
when to be one thing
is to be next to nothing?
Why do you look up? To hear
an echo like the voice
of god? You are all the same to us,
solitary, standing above us, planning
your silly lives: you go
where you are sent, like all things,
where the wind plants you,
one or another of you forever
looking down and seeing some image
of water, and hearing what? Waves,
and over waves, birds singing.
Glück’s gift in these poems is a capacity for lyric eruption coupled with emotional restraint. The voices are passionate but never hysterical; plants and God chide humans, as in the poem above, for their apparently willful ignorance, but the criticism never reads as self-pity.
Perhaps most audaciously, Glück undertakes to render divine speech, the language of the “unreachable father.” She succeeds by imagining the voice of God not anthropomorphically (beyond the personification implicit in imposing specifically human language on flora and the divine alike) but as natural phenomena, a pantheistic sense of divine manifestation. The poems work their magic in part by never making explicit the convention of the book; as we read, we come to understand what these different voices represent. The occasional confusions serve Glück’s purpose; we come to see how our own sense of ourselves gets imposed, repeatedly and unconsciously, on things sacred and mundane—how those very categories reflect our peculiarly human view. The centerpiece of the volume, appropriately titled “Midsummer,” begins by seeming to speak for the gardener:
How can I help you when you all want
different things—sunlight and shadow,
moist darkness, dry heat—
Listen to yourselves, vying with one another—
And you wonder
why I despair of you,
you think something could fuse you into a whole—
As the poem builds, we correct our reading and understand that God regards us with the same frustrations with which we regard tomatoes that fail to blossom as we had hoped. We were not, this divine voice informs us, “intended / to be unique”:
You were
my embodiment, all diversity
not what you think you see
searching the bright sky over the field,
your incidental souls
fixed like telescopes on some
enlargement of yourselves—
Why would I make you if I meant
to limit myself
to the ascendant sign,
the star, the fire, the fury?
These poems grapple honestly and successfully with questions of ultimate reality, not sheering away from critical self-assessment nor veering into a merely postured piety. They sing and praise and renew with successive readings.
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