The Year in Poetry 1992

The process of reading most volumes of poetry published in the U.S. during an entire year provides a wider basis for drawing conclusions about “the state of American poetry” than most casual readers would willingly invite; the nineteen collections reviewed were selected from nearly 200 perused. Sadly, most books read over this year and last demonstrate minimal craft, both in terms of the poets’ abilities to use aural, rhythmic, metrical, or figurative elements and their broader skills at structuring poems to reflect a complex of emotional and intellectual responses to the world. To call most books published in any given year “mediocre” states a statistical commonplace; more troubling, the quality of work produced by widely published and honored poets ranks as slight when measured against a standard that includes the best of what has been written. The institutionalization of mediocrity, ratified by committees that dispense such annual laurels as the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, reflects not only a nationalized indifference to the state of poetry but a frightening level of ignorance concerning it.

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 United States today.

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, Clark has 48 published volumes listed at the beginning of this new collection, and the author’s note indicates that this is the fifth volume of his selected poems issued by Black Sparrow since 1978, the last most recent published in 1990. Granted that not all of the 48 books are volumes of poetry and even that being prolific is itself no single grounds for condemnation of quality, the question of need remains. Many of this book’s 212 pages are scarcely filled. One section of new poems, “Diary of a Desert War,” is comprised of often no more than one or two lines per page; one reads in its entirety, “Rode into brown hills—death in the air.” This 44-page section could easily have been printed in ten pages, with no loss either of poetic effect or design quality—and this, like all Black Sparrow books, is beautifully designed and produced. This kind of profligate wastefulness seems an apt metaphor for Clark’s talent; he has wit and intelligence but is too often satisfied with a brief, cute impression, the kind of tossed-off effort that characterizes so much Black Mountain derivative poetry. Better if inspiration were allowed time to deepen, the work granted more opportunity for revision. Overall, the older, selected work satisfies more, perhaps because time has done the difficult job of winnowing every poet should be expected to perform in assembling a book.

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’ Paterson, apparently the final volume in New Directions’ re-edited issues of Williams’ complete works. By combing through every published edition and comparing them with galleys and typescripts, MacGowan has attempted to present Paterson in a version that best reflects Williams’ intentions. The typescript versions of the preliminary drafts of a sixth book demonstrate how laborious this task was; following his strokes, even Williams’ typing requires considerable interpretation. MacGowan sought not to correct every possible typographical or printing error; if an error seemed a “mistake” Williams deliberately made in composition, MacGowan chose to retain it. This volume gives us a clean, accurate version of an important poem; readers will be served by New Directions bringing out an affordable paperback edition quickly.

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 California coastline. The heart of this narrative is not a compelling sequence of events; after the early blood-bath, the violence is for the most part internal, deriving from frustrated passions and the apparently near-complete inability of these characters to find words to express their inner lives. Iris comes closest toward the end of the poem, in conversation with a hitchhiker. Speaking to the woman in the dark, she says,

“...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 Kyoto

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.

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.