The Green Dark:
Boland, Eavan
THE GREEN DIRK THE POISE OF THE JUGGLER Marie Ponsot Alfred A. Knopf, $16.95 70 pp. Ecnran Belaid These are poems of a deceptive restraint. They are deeply personal, yet they avoid being a...
...The first section, for instance, which is titled "The Story of the Problems" is a marvelous study in the purposes of this poetry...
...Like all fine poetry, Marie work belongs not just to its own private agenda, nor even to the durable themes it engages through that agenda...
...There is something happening here which is almost magical in its effect and characteristic enough of this poet as to appear almost to be her signature...
...But is there such a discourse...
...a process which, as I hope to suggest later, Marie Ponsot has a singular understanding of and affinity with...
...A line can seem to turn a corner, then turn another one, then falter like someone caught in a warren of modern offices...
...The beautiful, long poem "Take Time, Take Place," in the third section of the book, is a moving sequence...
...and it enriches the object of its speculation...
...They level with the reader in areas of haunting intensity...
...In many ways it is a speculation on poetry itself...
...But just when they seem about to be scarred with the honesty they demand and engage, the language-takes on the delightful showiness of the lyric event: applerinds are made to redden in flowering orchards...
...In the meantime the momentum these poems have at their best has been lost...
...Because of this, her poems enter the current discourse about poetry in America at"a particularly vital point...
...This maneuver is characteristic of the depth and worth of this book...
...This is a book with wonderful successes in it...
...In an especially graceful phrase, the juggler is said to be wearing a " suit of nerve...
...taken to the full is morning swallow-soaring, easily voicing the sounds of inner rejoicing in its readiness...
...In fact, the debate in a poetic community is always more coherent and sustained than it appears...
...It is also committed...
...It takes its place in the contemporary debate within American poetry...
...But this, in a very real sense, is carping...
...The juggler aims for both balance and composure, and finds both by her instinctive cooperation with forces greater than herself...
...She is involved in "a phase of the great legislation/she proposes to obey...
...Again and again, Marie Ponsot makes poems which start with images of a concrete and private intensity and then circles them with abstractions and ideas and returns, on that route, to the puritan imagination, which will neither deny the force of the private experience nor allow it to remain in secular isolation...
...It also leads her out of her text into her context...
...dreams are "a windbreak for retrieval and repair...
...At other times both language and image become too busy in the service of the intelligence behind them...
...The one use of what they do is skill...
...What is more, this language never becomes cloying, because Marie Ponsot suspends it so often in a music dark with irony...
...It is-called "Wearing the Gaze of an Archaic Statue" and it evokes the poise of the juggler, discovering her art through her skill...
...She is also "on her own here...
...These are lines from a poem called "Gliding" in Marie Ponsot's earlier book Admit Impediment...
...and, of course, in taking its place it also takes its stand...
...But this is a book full of discoveries...
...At times the lineation lacks the necessity and force the language calls for...
...that is illusion and superstition...
...It characterizes Marie Pon-sot's engagement with her world...
...skill works against limits to cancel out sloppiness, tedium and some pain...
...Poems called "The Problem of the Experimental Method" and "The Problem of Social Growth"neither invite nor inveigle...
...of course there are...
...They are deeply personal, yet they avoid being a private language...
...Even the most preliminary reading of this will show that she is a poet of real consistency...
...And there are flaws...
...An irritable reader might point to a welter of echoes and voices in contemporary American poetry and doubt that any poet can be more than part of the cacophony...
...I prefer to record the winners...
...Its own third section, composed of sonnets, is particularly successful...
...Yet when they are read, they are fresh and musical and rewarding...
...One poem, in particular, in The Green Dark seems almost an autobiography for the poetic statement in general...
...The poetry in The Green Dark is sober and candid and bright...
...It is a wonderful paradigm...
...To practice is to take a chance on joy, I think...
...At one point in the poem, her performance is described in adroit metaphysical negatives: "her small, touching skill is/holding nothing...
...At a moment in American poetry when, from the outside, there can seem to be a real unease about the relation of art to skill, Marie Ponsot's work, in the space of time it occupies, heals that division and refreshes that tension...
...one skill is plenty...
...Poems like "Wearing the Gaze of an Archaic Statue'' and' 'Gliding'' in her earlier book-and other poems in The Green Dark-are saying very insistently, there is no rift between art and skill...
...Poems as ambitious as these are bound to have complex failures to go with their complex aspirations...
Vol. 115 • November 1988 • No. 19
