New Selected Poems of Ted Hughes/Whisper to the Earth/Selected Poems of Galway Kinnell/Dream Flight:
Molesworth, Charles
An almost unshakable hold NEW SELECTED POEMS Ted Hughes Harper & Row, $15.50, 242 pp. WHISPER TO THE EARTH David Ignatow Atlantic, little Brown, $10.95, 88 pp. SELECTED POEMS Galway...
...In Galway Kinnell's Selected Poems thirty-five years of poetry definitely originates in a single, identifiable sensibility...
...But more often the language and settings are dreamlike, and as the book's title says, born of flight...
...From the largely ironic and structured First Poems, on through the ecstatic longing for transcendence in Body Rags (1968) and The Book of Nightmares (1971), Kinnell's career develops as a.paradigm of one of the major shifts in postwar poetry...
...He wonders at one point about the thrushes' "bullet and automatic/Purpose," and insists that "Mozart's brain had it, and the shark's mouth.'' For Hughes the universe is quick with purpose, but that is no saving grace, nor is it redeeming knowledge, given the nature of that purpose...
...Throughout all of his volumes, this poet has known a central paradox: It is written in our hearts, the emptiness is all...
...From the first poem in the volume there is the awareness of a force beyond our usual limits: Something else is alive Besides the clock's loneliness And this blank page where my figures move...
...This is how we have learned, the embrace is all...
...as if unable to master the memories or longings they have stirred up...
...What the poem tells us usually draws on these stores of experience, and we have to listen with a following ear and quick eyes...
...Occasionally the poems end flatly ("She's dead now, I think...
...Not only jaguars and eagles, but pike and thrushes and gnats are made to serve this drama of inquiry and conflict between and among the forces of nature, consciousness, and blinding emotion...
...Large scope has to reside in balance, the balance of any lyrical utterance...
...Ig-natow apparently knows he cannot formulate a bold or large statement about life, but his recourse to an existential acceptance of the limited self doesn't stop him from circling his own psychologized awareness...
...TOM O'BRIEN is a free-lance writer who teaches English at the Manhattan School of Music...
...Drawing on various sources such as Rilke, Whitman, Lawrence, and Frost, Kinnell's poetry gained prominence because of its Romantic scale and yearning...
...CHARLES MOLESWORTH is a professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York.of the City University of New York...
...Readers insist on music and pleasure when they turn to a poem, and many contemporary poets are returning to these qualities after a long period of brittle wit and grim irony...
...There are other poets who echo some of its dread but none outstrip its mad logic...
...of Illinois Press, $10, 76 pp...
...Here are brief reports on the latest work of some studious teachers...
...The flights are chapters of psychological quest, fuller than Ignatow's, less sublime than Kinnell's but with a distinction of its own...
...REVIEWERS DAVID BENSMAN teaches labor studies at Rutgers University and is writing a book on labor's concession bargaining...
...One is reminded of Keats's line, "where but to think is to be full of sorrow.'' But there is no soft incense or drowsy numbness in Hughes...
...The book includes four "conversations" that prosaically rewrite Beckett, and there are touching poems about his desk chair, want ads, and fantasies about air travel, but everything illustrates the same lesson...
...DREAM FLIGHTS Dave Smith Univ...
...Those poems from the middle of the journey - "The Porcupine," "The Bear," and "The Last River" - brought to perfection one strain of the American sublime, that imperious, empatheticr invasion of nature with its need to infinitize the ego and yet to gather all details, all sensory awareness...
...SELECTED POEMS Galway Kinnell Houghton Mifflin, $12.50,148 pp...
...Ted Hughes's New Selected Poems expands on the earlier Selected Poems of fifteen years ago, and so we have to confront almost three decades of this distinctly atavistic poetry...
...This shift affected the work of many poets directly, such as Robert Bly and James Wright, but it also indirectly altered the major idiom of American poetry, moving as it did toward a language of empathy, and celebration...
...He wants to arrive "at the bottom of my historical place," as the first poem says, to be "buoyed beyond the dark snags and splinters of what we once were," as the last poem promises...
...But his love of a full, even lush, music marks him as a writer worth our care and concern...
...Dave Smith's poetry contains more of a knowledge hungered for than a wisdom obtained...
...For Hughes the questions, before and after Crow, are whether consciousness will survive its own cosmic anger (the answer apparently is Yes), and whether this survival promises anything beyond itself (here the answer is No...
...After such knowledge, what forgiveness," asked Eliot, and some people have been bold enough to formulate answers...
...Each of these books possesses a firm knowledge, an almost unshakable hold on one person's experience...
...He prefers to go it alone, and he takes limited pleasure in knowing millions of others share this common solitude...
...But many poets also know there is no turning back from the pained awareness of modern reality, and if they're to sing and delight us, they must continue to tell us what they know...
...Even when Kinnell's asceticism veers towards masochism, and his religious temper mingles with secular celebration, we have work that must be attended to if We are to measure our poetry at its fullest...
...Charles Molesworth WHAT SORT of knowledge does poetry offer us...
...We can hear some faint tones of the confessional strain that dominated our poetry two decades ago...
...Crow remains his major statement, the repository of his darkest humors if not his brightest music, and this massive symbolic construct mixes notions of death, nihilism, and immortality...
...The heart has its reasons, however, and the dream has its question and answer dialectic...
...Driving right to the extreme consequences of the primitive strain in modern poetry, Hughes employed animals to focus his knowledge of human fate...
...Opening with a few poems about trees and clouds, the dominant tone turns from one of acceptance ("He is without fault, he is of the weather") to one of isolation, and finally to despair ("we are the life we live and none other...
...Deranged joy, caustic wit, the gesture toward the sublime: seldom do these post-Romantic answers appeal to Ignatow...
...The balance of this formulation doesn't guarantee the truth of its scope, its desire to know and say "all," but it embodies that desire...
...Kinnell's best poems plunge us into a darkness that is more than sufficient, and their light is made bearable only by their music...
...His Yorkshire blood is clear with rage...
...Throughout poems written with minimum regard for the measures of verse, and in the prose pieces which make up half the book, the language runs to the flat, almost affect-less plain style of American speech...
...With David Ignatow's poetry the knowledge offered is almost exclusively that of solipsistic boredom...
...FATHER ARTHUR F. McGOVERN, S.J., is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Detroit and the author of Marxism: An American Christian Perspective (Orbis...
...The gloomy, almost satirical view of man's folly and benightedness turns apocalyptic with the epic ferocity of Crow (1971), by which time Hughes was generally regarded as the best living British poet...
...Smith is the youngest of these four poets, and in some ways is still learning what he needs to say...
...For Hughes the universe may occasionally surrender its secrets but it never abates its strengths...
...The plangency here comes from an unassimi-lated grand style such as Robert Penn Warren's, one of Smith's acknowledged sources...
...His Anthology of Fantastic Literature was published last spring by Lester & Orphen Dennys...
...The spirit of Eliot's Prufrock lives in Ignatow's spare dailiness, and he honestly faces and declaims his moral enervation...
...Often the poems are about places - Virginia, Utah, an abandoned boatyard - where the speaker remembers a childhood guilt, or speaks as a father trying to reassure his own children...
...Sometimes the language veers into a slightly cliched Southern romanticism: "hard eyes glitter and pour forth in passion," or a knife "cuts quickly in like a hurried kiss...
...The speaker shows scant interest in music or images, and his world seldom unfolds as more than an occasion of sad isolation...
...Emptiness answered by embrace: these are for Kinnell an emotion and a bodily gesture, a physical condition and a spiritual response...
...All four can delight and teach, and they are all readily opened by any reader's inquiring mind...
...As in Wordsworth's "Immortality Ode," we are given "fallings from us, vanishings" as the source of our knowledge...
...ALBERTO MANGUEL is co-author, with Gianni Guadalupi, of The Dictionary of Imaginary Places...
...They are hardly comforting answers, and they lack the certitude of science...
Vol. 110 • March 1983 • No. 5
