The Snow Poems/The Selected Poems
Proffitt, Edward
ing of Everyman in the twentieth century so elliptical that it is occasionally enig- characterize Jesus in his humanity and his autobiographical allusions touch matic alludes to the...
...His ings, of the vagaries of the weather and of and method is that of detailed observation himself...
...And a measure, perhaps, place thus as the latest in a long line of (as Ammons has it, "achieve an identity, of the vigor of our culture, or of its rewhat I call "epic lyrics...
...linguistic potential...
...Music, cats, bread, cheese, stars, and well water are good...
...Which brings us back to hard ware hard sell . tion...
...word lists, as innumerable as his weather The Selected Poems (Norton, $7.95), For more information call Angie O'Gorman reports, with respect to which, indeed, strikes me in much the same way...
...simply, "long...
...Stephen Seley's The Cradle Will are the convictions of religion, Trilling earned an important place by vir- Fall-which had been quite forgotten a but its methods are the methods of literature...
...Take, mons's intent, I take it, was to suggest 908 E. 31st St., Kansas City, MO 64109 for instance, a poem called "Hard the major themes of the Collected Poems (816) 753-2677 Lard"-one of my favorites...
...He ing, even if a simple view of the imag- insight and like most illustrative art, discusses his building of a sanctuary ined historical Jesus is not to one's taste...
...The climate of the self computers, credit cards, money are bad...
...give intimations of the temperature of a presumably a holier tense...
...whose shared life...
...Unfortunately this kind of religion doesn't help those of us who don't have THE SNOW POEMS something like symbol...
...every little lyric piece must to the dilemma, perforce a lyric solution table book, He Was One of Us, -The Life be taken with every other...
...If a rebirth of a TIE SELECTED POEMS man "fifty in the mid-seventies" (p...
...Unfailing insight REYIEWMi THE FORTIES Shores of Light and Classics and Commercials, or even of Alfred Kazin's ConDiana Trilling temporaries...
...however brilliantly executed, its slick ("Pacem in Terris") in Warwick, New The prefatory observations by the text and appealing realism can restrict rather York, and his religious response to the writer, Hans Bouma, suggest the than release the imagination, or substipersonality of John XXIII...
...Whether by gain new dimensions in this new context...
...And, amongst these figures, Mrs...
...But this does not mean that the tament illustrated, however, will always of his experience he pleads for a re- man Jesus is pictured on every page...
...Or I might say that though the vapidity and decay: mands to be taken in the context of the poem is full of marvelous high jinks (ofwhen duh whole, which builds not by logical prog- ten typographical, more often dictional), going git ression but by psychological association...
...intent or not, this is what Ammons has My only complaint against The Selected achieved...
...What are our con- as he is about the nature of the mind...
...They give the wells and must deal with credit cards, A.R...
...And given the rather of- WE HAVE here Stevens's Major Man The Snow Poems...
...Indeed, there's almost not a who sings in the shower or the rain unbe...
...so today was mostly dark and low- down to The Cantos, The Four Quartets, I proffered the people great mul- ering Paterson, "Notes Toward a Supreme titude of mercy, and blustery but nice Fiction," Olson's Maximus, Zukofsky's And few there be asketh it heartily...
...as Herman Wouk'sAurora material, Roland Frye tells the the opportunity we now have of looking Dawn, Ira Wol fert'sAn Act of Love, John story of the Bible in narrative in bulk at what she did for The Nation Hersey's A Bell for Adano, Frederic form...
...vividly a sense of place...
...A poem deserving the label poet could make one wait breathlessly for ture (words) and nature (the human "epic" is a poem-substantial of another and then another...
...obscures his vision...
...He de- passage which inspired each illustration...
...it palpably renders a sense of deepening tough duh The Snow Poems, then, is very much meditation: meditation on the process of tough git greater than the sum of its parts...
...Franck has unifying theme: "This book can be tute sentiment for religious vision...
...Trilling hardly more than a page, and thus she had no chance for the Nathan A. Scott...
...They thank cloudy and rainy in the afternoon mented things, the spontaneous expresme not," says God, in that enduring text, with a falling off of temperature sion of spots of time and not the product "for the pleasure that I to them down of sustained intellectual effort...
...For a play evoking example- this seemingly inevitable conjunction has a religious attitude I much prefer the orig- fair this morning, much caused a problem: How to write the long inal which, fortunately, is included in warmer, over fifty, but poem...
...But is this poetry...
...Using tue of the wit and intelligence and cour- few months after their issuance and about a quarter of the King tesy with which she scrutinized and which now hold no significance for us at James Version and adding evaluated the current fiction that came all...
...need to know what a religious attitude is...
...And how refreshing might note too that the three or four well in this most immodest of epochs to enknown poems selected by Ammons counter such a quality, and such a man...
...For the lyric is the Me . . . ?) his play is scarcely the landscape- musing incessantly about mode of self, or its expression, as anyone Buddhist-Christian credo he claims it to the weather...
...of this period...
...I slighting our existential dilemmas, and cerns...
...With its recurrence of persona Poems is its supreme modesty: it runs to (i.e., a figure named "Ezra," a would- 105 pages, as against the 391 pages of the be prophet repeatedly effaced by the Collected Poems, 1951-1971 and howelements) and of motif (e.g., the effacing ever many pages have come since...
...The New Tesof the horrors of the 20th century, and out humanity...
...and the stringent assessments and the complexities of human nature and destiny as revealed various sorts of readings of the Zeitgeist, of these books that Mrs...
...Denis Donoghue sum- ness the more separate the being from the hard ball hard time marizes the kind of structure that I'm object of its desire...
...First, the structure of cism won't do...
...But this it is not...
...tural resources as much as our natural...
...Freedom is another, hard hard pointing to as " 'juxtaposition without or the wonderful, onerous burden of and ends: copula,' in Marshall McLuhan's phrase, choice and self-creation that freedom hard fart hard tack or progression by contrast and associa- necessitates...
...So our poets have found a solution Doubleday offers us another coffee- abstractable...
...I wind), The Selected Poems takes on a would have liked more for the sake of direction and a coherence that make it Ammons's reputation...
...Allowing the reader to must occasion some regret that over the Wakeman's The Hucksters, Betty follow Biblical history in last thirty years she has produced so little Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn- chronological order, this criticism, for her books-Claremont Es- which for a brief time in the forties car- Reader's Bible gradually unsays (1964) and We Must March, My ried a large appeal for the half-educated folds the character of God Darlings (1977)-are largely devoted to multitudes...
...Each lyric finds its place and de- deepen...
...Trilling offers in the Old and New Testaof the "climate" of moral and political will some day need to be regarded as ments...
...The many snippets looks like an anthology, simply a collec- These are Ammon's themes, which in- of contemporary speech in The Snow tion of lyric poems...
...Lyrics are, by nature little fragthis book as an appendix...
...ing of Everyman in the twentieth century so elliptical that it is occasionally enig- characterize Jesus in his humanity and his autobiographical allusions touch matic alludes to the particular Gospel through their genuinely human reactions ground, as his play does not...
...12.95 opinion...
...Edward Proffitt I have now touched on the main points Franck's Buddhist-Christian romanti- I wish to discuss...
...Absolutely, in con- A, Berryman's Dream Songs, and so text...
...At down to the present, our theme of themes chattering about Me...
...I the mark of the man...
...And in aging, on life on its way to death...
...It is, in fact, quite pretentious and page without its weather report: a random derstands...
...Join Bishop Carroll Yet another theme of the volume is the/small and mean" (p...
...AmPax Christi National Assembly the word lists seem contrapuntal...
...Ammons and of a cultural climate-the midhumanity (EveryOne reborn), then we Norton, $7.95, 105 pp...
...Ammons feel of the place, yes, and thereby render and who live in linear time, as distin- Norton, $12.50, 292 pp...
...I come back to those weather reports, Still, the poem itself is evidence of It is "epic" in a more meaningful for it seems to me most remarkable that a what is possible yet-vis-a-vis both culsense as well...
...But an excessive romanticism get to see...
...About my Son/ least, we have probably a major poet- (has been the self, and our poetic medium Who is my Son/ but he Who dares to see Ammons looms ever larger on the poetic has been the lyric...
...Out of the fragments of himSixth National Assembly enlightenment self, that is, he creates the figure of Major Oct...
...flaky/fool of hope/than the/smartass/of for the' Nuclear age...
...And when the (as opposed to a narrative solution, say): of Jesus of Nazareth, by Rien Poortvliet, whole of this long volume is read all of the poems just enumerated emerge the illustrator of Gnomes...
...He is in no way simplis- red by our debris-oblivious to his musAVIIER PEACE tic or propagandistic, however...
...to all that Jesus does...
...But what do we make of this At first sight, to be sure, the volume grave"-p...
...find a direction, . . . wait for the sources...
...Yet it was THE READER'S just her way of reckoning with this reF ONE IS OF a sufficient age, to read the striction that revealed her talent for the I pieces that Diana Trilling has col- swift, central judgment of the essential lected from her work as chief fiction re- drift of a career or of a particular book...
...Not that Ammons is not confesbackdrop of nature's permanently chang- sional...
...scribes his "trans-religious" search for It is hard to fault these Biblical illustra- He Was One of Us, however, is not understanding and peace, from his ex- tions unless one is looking for something religious art...
...and too rarely has she consented indispensable for whoever undertakes to put her splendid critical gifts in the seriously to study popular literary tastes At bookstores or from service of literary interpretation...
...seventies...
...Mary Evelyn Jegen, Rev...
...For The Nation normally Harooart Brace Jovanovich, $9.95, 272 pp allotted Mrs...
...Emanuel anything else give report of the cultural Cleaver and others in planning peace in climate...
...But modesty is much more than a simple anthology...
...Against the broad despair...
...Nature is certainly one, or the come back to these reports too because second because it appears at a time when place of evolving consciousness in a they serve still another function: they our sense of poetry by and large seems provide counterpoint to the more local tied to narrowly confessional bursts of concerns of the poem...
...Yet this Am- spirit...
...spacious, leisurely estimate...
...As a whole, The Snow Poems is necessity-in which the major concerns mons accomplishes, perhaps because he remarkably uplifting-remarkable first and preoccupations of a culture are is a man as passionate about the weather because Ammons is no goody-two-shoes brought into focus...
...Thus Ammons's innumerable winter finding it no bad place...
...Out of The Dozier, Tom Cornell, Eileen Egan, Gor- words themselves, for words more'than Snow Poems emerges a portrait of the don Zahn, Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, man we need, a man with a mind of Sr...
...a man who would "rather be the I'VIt-l I•: 1'I' 18 workshops on spirituality and strategy...
...Yet, for the ambitious poet, ultimately deceiving...
...It begins: and, perhaps, to build yet another longish Commonweal: 5.38 poem by the strategic juxtaposition of ("Corsons Inlet," "The' City Limits") judiciously selected lyrics...
...As terweave much like themes in music...
...But Poems-diction is Ammons's prime I've suggested, nothing here is abstracts- as they recur and recur again, they medium, and his ear is perfect-suggest ble...
...Ordinary folk who uniquely about...
...205...
...19, 20, 21 fills the air with smoke, Man, struggling toward affirmation in Benedictine College darkens the day the face of falling hair and rotting teeth, Atchison, Kansas So it is that he gives measure of our of a landscape-beautiful however marcultural climate...
...accurately painted in words...
...Many lived through and been touched by many looked upon as an act of homage to Jesus' people will like this book...
...Princeton The present book does not have the It is, however, her discussions of the weight and range of such similar collec- important writers and literature at the University Press tions, say, as Edmund Wilson's The fore in the forties that claim our principal Princeton, New Jersey 08540 28 September 1979:539...
...ship, Clement Greenberg and James A vast number of these reviews are KING JAMES VERSION Edited, with an Agee, B. H. Haggin and Reinhold devoted to books-Arnold Manoff's Introduction and Notes, by Niebuhr and Harold Laski, as its regular Telegram from Heaven, Betty Baur's ROLAND MUSHAT FRYE contributors, were giving it an authority The White Queen, Michael De Capite's approached by no other weekly of the Maria, Charles Mills's The Choice, The convictions of the Bible time...
...Many others are devoted to introductory and transition across her desk week after week...
...7) religious attitude will usher us into our A.R...
...Neverthemeant, to where a few snowflakes flew less, the whole period has witnessed a Nor yet for their being that I them and number of long poems, from The Prelude have lent...
...the 1980s...
...From Wordsworth on fensive lines attributed to God ("Stop encounting Major Weather...
...Almost nothing in this volume is forth...
...BIBLE viewer for The Nation in the 1940s is to And it is a brilliance of this kind which is feel a certain nostalgic longing for that most noticeable, as one moves through A NARRATIVE marvelous period of the journal's career the ninety-some pieces that are here as- SELECTIONS FROM THE when, under Freda Kirchwey's editor- sembled...
...In attractive and technically excellent illustmedieval Everyman for the first time, to fact, the hands and faces which tell this rations of some Biblical characters who his discovery of Buddhism-and a com- story of Jesus of Nazareth-in its quite responded to the presence of Jesus...
...Sparse prose, through, the weather reports build to out of the amalgamation of short lyrics 28 September 1979: 53 7 juxtaposed so as to produce wholes non-conscious world and the paradox Hard lard hard fact greater than the sum of their lyric parts by that the greater the degree of conscious- hard wind hard core association...
...This defines exactly the structure self, its progressive delineation even as, hard head hard boil of The Snow Poems, which takes its poignantly, it moves toward obliteration What a delight...
...But they also guished from something called NOW...
...It is quite simply a series of perience as a child in Holland seeing the the book does not pretend to offer...
...Illus...
...Indeed, novels-such...
...The parable tale in Eastern tradition called literal sense-are exceptionally appeal- scenes offer no particularly new religious "The Man and His Four Wives...
...But he is so in the way that NATIONAL ASSEMBLY ing landscape, Ammons flashes scenes Wordsworth is: through autobiography of this he reaches the deeper reservoir of our PAX CHRISTI nasty century...
...It is look a bit like actors on a set, and that sort awakening of a religious attitude towards much more people around him that you'll of vision is not quite what the Gospels are life...
...It gone man that the parts build to a greater whole, the renders also a moving sense of process, whole they build to is "epic" in the sense or life as process-which finally is the The suggestion is that we abuse our culof "substantial," "encompassing," or, burden of Ammons's weather reports...
Vol. 106 • September 1979 • No. 17
