OF IMAGERY AND IMAGINATION
Hahn, Claire
BOOKS OF IMAGERY AND IMAGINATION CLAIRE HAHN The Gift To Be Simple ROBERT PETERS Liveright, $6.95 No Running on the Boardwalk PAUL RAMSEY V. of Georgia Press, $3.95 (paper) Statues of the...
...It is a day of quarrels and a day of sin...
...The poet attempts to imagine himself into the life of Mother Ann Lee, foundress of the Shakers and to speak for her in a series of lyric and narrative poems...
...APPLEWHITE U. of Georgia Press, $3.95 (paper) Robert Peters' The Gift To Be Simple is an ambitious project...
...she is imprisoned in a madhouse and subsequently flees from England with her followers...
...free verse and experimental forms examine the problems of human desires, betrayals, confusion...
...Eventually Ann becomes a convert of James Wardley, a Quaker who preached Christ's Second Coming as a woman...
...We visit your old office on campus in grief...
...His Ann Lee is an often grotesque puppet responding to her controller's whims...
...The patterning which spins the stars Exists outside this weather we live under...
...It would make for tidiness if I could also call James Applewhite's Statues of the Grass a book of religious poems but I'm more than willing to forego the neatness of the symmetrical review for the discovery of these unusual lyrics...
...I have not been so enthralled by the magic wedding of imagery and music in many recent years of reading contemporary poetry...
...What he is ultimately seeking for in his dedication to history are images which form some pattern of human integrity, some way in which his inescapable inheritance can be metamorphosized into a present value...
...His overalls Heavy with money, he hauled me into light of his example...
...Inevitably he invites comparison with John Berryman's Homage To Mistress Bradstreet...
...Statues of the Grass is in many ways a series of poems of discoveries...
...Peters imagines these events in graphic detail and often an individual poem leaps to a startingly intense life as in "Ann to Abraham...
...We see only branches against those clouds' inclemency...
...The father then Swam up under the capsized boat And saved me to my name...
...She agonizes over the death of her four children and has bouts of madness...
...Outside, trees lift winterward branches toward A sky in chaos...
...Her husband's love-making is torture for her...
...But she also sees, in "Claremont," her brothers having a sexual orgy in the fields with the more than willing: "Miss C." Ann is shocked and sickened...
...the Day replies by identifying itself with its seasonal operations of life, death, continuity...
...Ramsey does not thump his answers home...
...Paul Ramsey in No Running on the Boardwalk writes from his own deeply religious conviction of the stability of a Maker underlying the seeming chaos of a world in flux...
...The volume fails as a whole because Peters does not achieve his goal...
...In His Wounds is our peace...
...The automobiles strike at many angles to let death in...
...To the first, "who are you, O Shining One...
...The revolutionaries scream at each other in hatreds not to cease...
...BOOKS OF IMAGERY AND IMAGINATION CLAIRE HAHN The Gift To Be Simple ROBERT PETERS Liveright, $6.95 No Running on the Boardwalk PAUL RAMSEY V. of Georgia Press, $3.95 (paper) Statues of the Grass JAMES...
...Any flower offering would surely wither on the fevered brow of the neurotic and suffering Ann portrayed in this book...
...Applewhite writes often of his memories of his native North Carolina...
...Ann becomes the Female Christ of the first Shakers...
...The preachers are shouting in tongues we cannot interpret...
...Traditional lyrics sing of love lost or discovered, describe a garden or a Maine island...
...He searches faces at his grandfather's funeral: But I was not prepared for the beauty Of the old people coming from the church, He remembers in 'The Capsized Boat" how his father "pulled me alive from that odor of dying...
...It is an ordinary day in an American city...
...But if he finds himself shaped by each person and experience that touches him, Applewhite also knows how alone each person stands when he makes a moral choice...
...The songs which intersperse the sometimes flamboyant narrative poems are frequently lovely and quiet...
...Perhaps the thematic central poem of the volume is "The Askers Ask the Day...
...The rain rushes into the already overflowing gutters...
...In Peter's version of her life, Ann never recovers from this sexual disgust...
...The second question and answer hold in tension the paradoxes explored throughout the sequence of poems: human suffering and the healing promise of the Redeemer who dies and is born again in liturgical celebration: What day is this on which we are gathered to listen...
...These are contemplative poems written with the authority of one who controls his art...
...she sits at home by the fire, "unable to eat her dinner...
...In form and in subject matter his poems are varied, wide ranging...
...These poems, some long and serious, others like shining, bits of mica, fall together as do the colors of a kaleidoscope into striking design...
...Applewhite's first volume of poems establishes him as an enormously gifted writer...
...But, whereas Berryman seemed to live within the skin of the historic personage he recreated, Robert Peters' adroit performance is really a ventriloquist's act...
...The Day answers two questions...
...The earliest poems in the volume deal with Ann's childhood visionary experiences...
...The sequence covers the experience of - Ann from her childhood in Manchester, England to her arrival in New York Harbor...
...Each individual poem is carefully articulated and stands as a whole but No Running on the Boardwalk is really a unit...
...His roots in a place, in Southern history, and a particular family stir him to question, blame, and forgive...
...Perhaps the intractably melodramatic events of Ann's life or Peters' own talent for vivid detail make these poems less a garland than a gothic tombstone...
...Peters, who has considerable gifts as a poet, labors mightily, seriously, to make this garland for Ann Lee...
...He can make the English language float or sing...
...The Gift to Be Simple is a sequence of poems concerned with describing a religious experience...
...In one of the most moving of contemporary elegies, "William Blackburn, Riding Westward," the poet memorializes his dead teacher who now roams his brain, "King Lear after death...
...of the Grass is not only a fine first book-James Applewhite writes like one whose native language is poetry...
...She sees "Angels, fairies, and the face of Jesus, loving me...
Vol. 103 • October 1976 • No. 22
