Admit Impediment

...But mis book cannot be relegated to its formidable perception of the relation between the sexes...

...some pain can...

...Taken aback at all of us, she has moments of clear-sighted gloom-Here is a rational beast agile at the thumb, ignorant, concupiscent and steeped in lethargy . . . But the overall ambiance of the work is that of an almost mystical hope...

...And as a poet she sees clearly that "There is no truth that is not usable...

...Late at night he never knows you laugh...

...And she sees-as in "The Difference- Chateau Croissy," the slavish, secretive revenge, souring into sly of the woman secretly destroying each night of the sleep of the man she flatters by day: You'll see, you can call him Boss, Boss all day, he'll eat it up...

...It is hard to think of a contemporary poem which says more than does "Sois Sage O Ma Douleur'' about the woman who could make, and did not the . . . claims you earned and hid and did not choose to make, or did not make, or no one heard you make, while you made dinner, jokes, love, kids...

...The poetry's contemporary importance relates to the specifically feminine - to the problems and pressures and differences which bear on women now...

...and though she sees the male in general as destructive, and the female apprehending, she notes the pressures that have contributed to the former quality and the exceptions that distort the latter...

...most males do, as if they confuse Marking with marring...

...this is an indictment of a culture rather than of the male...

...To convey a deep, many-faceted sense of what has happened, and still is happening, to women, without losing the quintessential consciousness that in poetry the poem makes its own implacable demands, is a very rare success, one Marie Ponsot has achieved...

...for skill in nature, in humans, in the artist...

...It is a sort of perverse heroism, the opposite of the power-thirst, which at once touches and enrages die poet...

...She understands, in its every nuance, the impasse of the woman repelled by the uses of power, who knows within herself her own capacity for power...

...A sense of injustice, of outrage, of protest, does not, obviously, necessarily make for good poetry...

...What does one do, then, cornered by the word...

...This book, on every page, testifies to being the accumulated conclusions of a lifetime...

...Nothing real happens twice...

...as if innocent, Inept at awe, they smash what they can't use Or ignore . . . That "inept at awe" sets the tone...

...Another trait which sets the book apart from the general is that it is, in the author's phrase, "hope-ridden" She chalks up that rarest success-that of convincing us that her hope, her joy in existence, is not buoyed up by ignorance or insensitivity...

...some of these are contemporary, some timeless...

...Indeed, she writes of "Boys we raise to thrive under cockpit stress...

...How can we keep bur hot hatred of power from chilling into impotence...

...This is subject-matter much in the public eye, and a great deal of poetry - some good, mostly bad - is being dedicated to it...

...In what is perhaps the book's most impressive poem, "The Great Dead, Why Not, May know," Marie Ponsot speculates on death: . . . Suppose borne down on, we are birthed into a universe where love's not crazy...

...indeed, the overweaning desire to make a point, however valid, has sunk many a poem at launching...

...In the clear light and water of 'From the Foun-tain at Vaucluse" the women she watches cooperate with the genius-of-the-place...

...Use it...

...All this might have been ineffective if Ponsot were not a poet of great resource and discipline, with enormous respect for skill...

...In a passage too long for quotation, and one too fine to chop, she explores this imagined aspect of death in relation to language, and comes about as close to expressing the essence of poetry as words allow...

...But it is as though she felt joy itself to be unpossessable, to Be a communal nourishment which Can infuse the very quality of life...

...And she is able to admire the triumphant defeated: Groggy with joy and grief, Infirm, analphabet, allowed for, How was it you held steady Without franchise, where you stood At the last extremity of love...

...Skill, she says, works against limits to cancel out sloppiness, tedium, and some pain . . . Sloppiness and tedium can be canceled out...

...It is important in several ways and for several reasons...

...Ponsot admits impediments, looks them fully and fairly in the eye, and goes ahead-not unimpeded, but full of her own kind of poetic grace and unin-jurious power.her own kind of poetic grace and unin-jurious power...

...Part of the hope springs from the fact that never is she "inept at awe.'' She realizes, marveling, that there is a miraculous creativity at work, unique, unreproducible...

...She minces no judgments, but she is more concerned with human life than with any faction...

...girls without parade bend to the shoreline, cup their hands and drink But A boy throws stones so splashes distort The pool...

...A number of factors have worked toward this result: a sensitivity both brilliant and moving, a resourceful technique, and above all, a lack of rancor, of the vindictive or the shabby...

...Consequently she is not afraid of what she has to say...

...She could not be more aware of misery, and even of doom- "De Religione Humanitatis Vera" is a terrifying poem...

...so much so, in fact, that it has also become a fine word to avoid...

...This book is important and cannot be called less...

...and mat split out of time is death into a medium where love is the element we cry out to breathe big love, general as air here specific as breath...

...Its basic concern is with the human, and the sources of joy and pain...

...tuition money, friends, the most of dim situations, or the best of everything...