POETRY: THREE IN A BUMPER YEAR
Phillips, Robert
BOOKS POETRY: THREE IN A BUMPER YEAR Available Light PHILIP BOOTH Viking, $5.95 Fellow Feelings RICHARD HOWARD Atheneum, $4.95 (paper) The Mind-Reader RICHARD WILBUR Harcourt Brace...
...Nevertheless, while adding to the poems' musicality, such adjectives as "paludal," "crenellate" and "vatic...
...In his choice of vocabulary and strict forms, Mr...
...The only fault with The Mind-Reader is that it is not longer...
...Wharton replies, improbably, "Manque see, manque do...
...It is a poem as perfect as his best, "First Lesson," from his first collection, totally original and understated...
...Wilbur obviously does not care about changing fashions in poetry...
...Of the original poems, "The Writer" with its metaphor of artist as dazed starling involved in a life and death act is one of the most memorable...
...In poem after poem Booth's universal conclusions are earned by the punctilious particulars which precede them, nowhere more impressively than in "Wear," from this, his fifth collection...
...I've never understood why Philip Booth is not more widely admired...
...and the disastrous "Setting mere Rothschildsplay aside...
...If the book has two misfires ("Compulsive Qualifications" and "Howard's Way" poems in which questionable subjects seem paraded rather than contemplated), it also has many direct hits on fascinating and difficult targets...
...It follows Two-Part Inventions, six long dramatic poems obviously conceived as a book and not a gathering...
...Howard's and Wilbur's to sing elegantly...
...In "The Giant on Giant-Killing" we are given a defense of homosexuality, yet are reminded that the name Goliath, while meaning d-stroyer in Assyrian, means exile in Hebrew...
...Yet all wit and wordplay are employed to extremely serious ends...
...We are what we see...
...etc...
...The volume's best poem, the already-mentioned and autobiographical "Wear" in which the poet utilizes the purely mechanical failure of automotive parts as metaphor for the failing of the flesh: "What hurts/ is how blind tired I get...
...Like Howard, Wilbur writes poems which are brilliant and elegant...
...He has written splendidly, for instance, on the homely potato...
...Kissing is not cosmetic, merely cosmic...
...Verbal pyrotechnics call attention to themselves, rather than to the meaning they are employed to convey...
...Which is not to say Howard resembles Wilbur except for erudition and a penchant for the witty, for use of allusion to artifacts of the past to instruct the present...
...Wilbur cheerfully eschews such self-dramatization, prefering, no doubt, to identify with his "Black Birch in Winter," a tree which manages to survive and grow to greater wisdom each year, "To grow, stretch, crack, and not yet come apart.' Or as Wilbur says elsewhere, "There is nothing to do with a day except to live with it...
...There are a few occasions when his use of a pun, however delicious, nearly wrecks the fabric he has so carefully woven, as in "The Lesson of the Master" (from his previous book) when his Mrs...
...The forms are the same tall skinny poems with short lines, a form one might in jest suggest was born of The New Yorker's policy of paying for poetry by the line...
...In "Adding It Up" one has to think of Elinor Wylie's "Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones" when Booth states, "I'm Puritan to the bone, down to / the marrow...
...It reminds us of Salinger's entreaty for us' to love the fat lady...
...Some are worthy of Wilde: "Ripeness is hell...
...Decades...
...And the style surely is the same, understated and Anglo-Saxon as Hemingway's prose...
...or the Levertov of "The Tulips" a surprise from Booth, who not normally is given to strong image-making, depending for effect more upon tone, near-rhyme, and enjambment...
...Booth also gives us a purely imagistic poem, KA Late Spring: Eastport," brittle and precise as H.D...
...No poets could be more different than Booth is from Richard Howard and Richard Wilbur...
...Howard's most felicitous gift is for the well-turned epigram...
...Hithertofore Booth has been almost exclusively a Georgian, and a Maine Georgian at that...
...Fellow Feelings contains some of his most impressive work...
...They are among the best in a remarkable year for American poetry: 1976 already has seen new collections by Horace Gregory, Archibald MacLeish, Karl Shapiro, Robert Lowell, Richard Eberhart, John Hollander, James Merrill, Louis Simpson, and the late Anne Sexton, with volumes by Elizabeth Bishop, Irving Feldman, and Robert Penn Warren forthcoming...
...He is the one poet who seems to own the word "ceremony...
...And writing today much as he did three decades ago, he has produced another book which will be read long after the disposable poems of today's more "with-it" poets are discarded...
...Plath, condemned to live, went on to write what Wilbur calls "her brilliant negative" in poems "free and helpless and unjust...
...Available Light is familiar Booth, but also more varied than his previous books...
...And an accountant he is tallying up our human losses and gains in poems as deceptively simple as a ledger sheet...
...and "Cottage Street, 1953," a portrait of the young, suicidal Sylvia Plath and her mother visiting Wilbur and his mother-in-law...
...Of the latter, his rendering of Joseph Brodsky's "The Funeral of Bobo" is as simple and affecting as his earlier "Prayer to Go to Heaven With the Donkeys," of Francis Jammes...
...With Howard shorter is not slighter...
...Here are new books by one poet who prefers his nature au naturel, and two who are meticulous scrubbers...
...Cleveland was our mother-in-lieu...
...if I hadn't turned poet / I might ROBERT PHILLIPS well be some other / sort of accountant," he tells us in a poem from this new collection...
...Throughout the volume there is a feeling of singularity and alienation...
...If Richard Wilbur is our national poet of sanity, he also is our poet of delight...
...Rather than being sensational, Howard's poems convey tenderness, and seek understanding...
...Not mother-in-lieu...
...After the appearance of Unfilled Subjects a cycle of long poems came Findings a gathering of shorter unrelated ones...
...The latter two utilize Hart Crane's history and Donatello's bronze of David, respectively, to illumine Howard's own life...
...such verbs as "brisked," "gangled," and "fuddles...
...And Wilbur's diction is as elevated as his choice of subject, perhaps too elevated to win a wide audience (as if any poet in America wins an audience which is wide...
...These include "Let the Trees," "Stove," and "The Way the Tide Comes In...
...Despite these departures in subject, Booth's best are still the New England poems...
...Both poems openly explore homosexuality: indeed, the book is the most out-of-the-closet collection since Howard'a own Two-Part Inventions...
...Howard is one of our most original poets...
...He is, so far as I know, the first poet to put gurry fish offal in a poem...
...BOOKS POETRY: THREE IN A BUMPER YEAR Available Light PHILIP BOOTH Viking, $5.95 Fellow Feelings RICHARD HOWARD Atheneum, $4.95 (paper) The Mind-Reader RICHARD WILBUR Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $6.95 Robert Frost spoke of two kinds of poet one who likes his potato scrubbed clean, and one who leaves some dirt on it...
...These include "Venetian Interior, 1889," a remarkably full rendering of the sad world of Pen Browning...
...The tiny is the last resort of the tremendous...
...So too is "The Eye," especially its Part II, in which the poet reminds us of our inherent humbleness, entreating that we embrace not some, but all creatures, the halt and blind alike: "Charge me to see/ In all bodies the best of spirit...
...The new book widens this poet's world to include poems of Russia and Peru, psych-escapes of the dreamworld, several poems on the work of photographers (Walker Evans, Ralph Eugene Meat-yard), and on the lives of poets (Auden and Delmore Schwartz...
...and in the present book: "Poets should be obscene and not stirred...
...Booth's forte is to speak plainly...
...There is a scheme behind the publication of Howard's books...
...What is different in Available Light is not voice or technique, but subject...
...Fellow Feelings, the present volume, is for the most part work brief and varied...
...In the past Booth's most striking technical device has been his use of enjambment, and he continues to surprise with it here, as in this break between second and third lines: "On the far side/of the storm / window . . .", lines which give us both the far side of the storm and the far side of the window...
...and such nouns as "concatenation," "oubliette," and "concupiscence" (all taken from the new book) make his work seem more grand than his subjects often are...
...Other welcome new additions to the Wilbur canon are "A Wedding Toast" obviously an epithalamium for his daughter's nuptials...
...and "The Giant on Giant-Killing...
...But these unintentional echoes if they exist at all outside this reviewer's ear are minor flaws in a strong and original book...
...The strength of the genie comes of his being confined in the bottle," Richard Wilbur once said, an obvious justification of his work in strict metrical forms...
...I regret only five lines in the whole book...
...That Wilbur finds the stance of the so-called confessional poets unjust, unearned, is made manifest in the second of his "Flippances," in which he states the confessional poet justifies putting most anything into a poem except happiness: "All hangs together if you take it hard...
...The sacred and the suburban often coincide...
...Wilbur's first collection since 1969, it contains but twenty-seven poems and nine translations...
...He movingly pictures both himself and Crane as on "permanent short-leave from the opposite sex...
...The danger Howard risks is that he displays too much wit...
...In "Entry," the lines, "Given/ this day, none/better" seem a bit Frostbitten...
Vol. 103 • September 1976 • No. 19
