The Museum of Clear Ideas:
Keen, Suzanne
BOOKS A poke over the wall Donald Hall's new book of THE MUSEUM OF CLEAR IDEAS on their characteristic relations to time...
...For more information or a conference brochure, contact: Rev...
...Horsecollar form...
...The poems in this volume tackle the 9. No Red Sox tonight, but on Friday close to a bookstore that carries poetry...
...As er in a condition of suspension between I write, we have shaken loose the bonds Clad in Williams-and-Sonoma yuppie games, between actions, between memoof the basketball season, and turned our green, the book's cover only hints at its ry of past seasons and appetite for anothfull attention to baseball...
...her provided no details whatever on just what Hall's determination to renew lan- hair's kerchief is yellow...
...Now dissertation- praise ourselves while pretending to look picked-up pace of the "Third Inning...
...pink hollyhocks that the fiction of the poem allowed him Hall identifies the persona, Horace wilt and sag like teams out of the race...
...Even the ther...
...cause of the difficulties already being great skill and plausibility...
...The Politics of Virtue takes as its starting point the question of "whether THE SANCTITY OF CHOICE we can recover a meaningful public moral vocabulary...
...game...
...Rosenblatt's mentalism...
...with a deft from dulling in the ear...
...That "covenant" prothat direction, feeding off Tribe, in Abortion: The Clash ofAbsolutes vided a religious legitimation for abortion the perennial public opinion surveys that (Norton, 1990), and Roger Rosenblatt in reform, but also as a result stimulated a show most Americans ambivalent about Life Itself.- Abortion in the American Mind Protestant fundamentalist counterattack, the issue...
...problem of coming to an ending from a a doubleheader with the Detroit Get The Museum of Clear Ideas...
...We gather such a formula would look like in pracguage's energetic engagement with the yellow days tice...
...This interesting nary The Norton Anthology of Contemhand Hall waves away the symbols and communication makes a significant con- porary Verse...
...promise has some intensified drive behind answer: "abortion as a theologically deit...
...Themselves legal the conclusion to "Extra Innings," which Hall arrests us in the moment of hope that scholars (and married to each other), they recalls the penultimate game of the 1975 holds off the end...
...When learning and as a key to obscurities the readasters begin a late pennant drive I heard Hall read this poem, he explained er will have encountered...
...on VHS 30 from Hartford, ability to use varied sentence-structure, and The humor with which Hall delivers and and the pitcher stared at the batter...
...in nine innings, made of nine, nine-line yard and shout...
...Baseball" in- "Another Elegy," is a creature of inven- his master visually-the number and habits an alternative realm already, a tion, but this has been the case in poets' shape of stanzas in Horace's first book fictional space suspended outside of or- elegies for fellow poets, from Milton at of odes...
...to write his long-stalled elegy for the poet Horsecollar, who speaks the odes of the Good old-fashioned metaphor conjures James Wright, who died in 1980...
...Hall celebrates the cer- tents turned out to be rice pudding...
...Hall writes a canny comes under Hall's scrutiny...
...res in a sequence that invites meditation last night while my mother and I PACEM IN TERRIS and THE CHALLENGE OF PEACE An Anniversary Reflection and a Look to the Future • Featuring Robert F. Drinan, S.J...
...Addressed to the Dada col- least...
...Anyone who has suffered with a lution was shot down, always overpowThe final poem in the book, "Extra team, or waited for the results of the blood ered by fear of some limit on the right of Innings," takes up the fear of death directly...
...And check stanzas suggests that the end must occur the tomatoes, and the box scores...
...In salt preserves The Collected Poems outward...
...in front of the barn...
...forts, arguing for what he called a "perfriends cheek by jowl with his criticism we eat scrambled eggs from blue and mit but discourage formula...
...the cohabitation of sentence and line in lampoons the conventions of elegy is carThough they watch in the hospital, the stanzas, to emphasize shifts in tone and ried further by the hilarious spoof of the outcomes of the illnesses that "Baseball" rhetorical strategy keeps this long poem canonizing poet's bio, "from" the imagihas documented go unreported...
...University of Dayton 300 College Park Dayton, OH 45469 The University of Dayton (513)229-4321 Commonweal 24 September 1993: 21 watched in this vessel of Hall's invention suggests of mourning and envy, love and self-the way we listened, fifty years the reach and amplitude of an imagination love-as another morning back- at play in the fields of memory, opinion, delivers rain on the fishbone leaves spritely ghosts playing in heavy snow prophecy, and fresh experience...
...No home-run and heav- relations between visual art and literature...
...Two earlier sive triumph of a "hasty, uncritical air...
...The enjambment, or running over critique of the form and its history: does not exempt his ventriloquizer when lines, between the stanzas of the "First It is twelve Aprils since we buried he criticizes: "Praising our places, we / Inning" contrast with the businesslike him...
...Bill poem "The Museum of Clear Ideas," in up two kinds of time in a delightful shim- Trout, the dead poet remembered in such a note: "Lacking Latin, he follows mer of tenor and vehicle...
...These poems form the voldinary time...
...further fiction lays bare a convention of en here...
...ended game Six The problem with Tribe's book was that In a book preoccupied with the problem in the twelfth inning with a poke over his prochoice convictions were not suffiof making an end, of reacting honestly to the wall...
...This cutting indictment of the bland subject matter and weak form of contemporary poetry does not attempt to disguise Hall's own interest in remembering persons and places, in fixing the details of daily life in verse...
...The label In these extra poems, which surprise the Hall describes, "inning by inning with care on the can was hot tamales but the conreader with a return to "Baseball," Hall to appear careless...
...Hall de- than the Red Sox who beat the when winter comes and the tyranny of the ploys his work in and against these gen- Yankees hoop grips the nation once again...
...Yet the material contained the tradition reflections, in free verse without noticeable attention to line breaks, on snapshots of the poetic mother and father, in their weird clothes, on vacation, before the poet was born: How poignant it is, how remarkable that one's parents were older than oneself...
...Loss is forestalled but not denied in in patterned language unleashed in time, of Mensch and Freeman...
...In The Museum of Clear Ideas a reader will find love poems, poems about a sick parent, frightening diagnoses, aging, sex, and the old neighborhood...
...it's per- variety of perspectives and forms: elegy, Tigers, my terrible old team, worse fect for the season, and you can reread it lyric sequence, and Horatian ode...
...Mensch and Freeman Ronald Dworkin include some abortion provisions, and be- pursue the story of that replacement with Alfred A Knopf, $23, 273 pp...
...In poetry, penetrating and nuanced, particularly that bay...
...habits it...
...They use in our daily interactions...
...Books and poems and language 22: 24 September 1993 Commonweal belong in this poet's everyday world, so World Series: was the more successful of those two efwe find poems about old affairs or old I wear my yellow sweater...
...There is fresh pressure on Congress to batable subject [was] replaced by abortion LIFE'S DOMINION find a way to deal with abortion in light as a matter of personal choice and mediAn Argument about Abortion, of the coming debate on the Clinton ad- cal expertise," both well suited to stifle seEuthanasia, and Individual Freedom ministration's health-care plan, likely to rious reflection...
...To reread Suzanne Keen exactly where it does, when the form acHorace, James Wright, and to undertake tually runs out, the poem leaves the reada study of the undervalued art of tone...
...Clear Ideas, made me Donald Hall If the shape of the sequence "Baseball," want to run out into the Ticknor & Fields, $18.95, 120 pp...
...Along the way generated with the Senate's Freedom of they examine the rise and then decline of Daniel Callahan Choice Act...
...Yet this movement-and that (Random House, 1992) both deplored the which turned out to be an unpleasant mirword may be too strong-has had trouble nasty flavor of the American debate, and ror image of a liberal prochoice fundafinding the kind of strong leadership and both sought some way out...
...There has long been an books by prochoice advocates took an covenant with secular culture" in mainunderground movement in irenical stance...
...suggests that compassionate actions and emonial calendar of the baseball season The two books reviewed here are more the solaces of dailiness can hold fear at in its relation to human lives...
...He directs our attention away from In focusing on "Baseball," I have leapt contemporary poetry books: the appendix the diamond to the natural world: ahead in the order of the book, which be- of notes used as an exhibit of the poet's By the railroad goldenrod stiffens...
...gins, wryly, with "Another Elegy...
...How much does "Lycidas" tell us ume's second sequence, in which the lagist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), the about dead Edward King, and how much range of tones and topics widens even furpoem attempts an explanation of the the- about ambitious John Milton...
...Commonweal 24 September 1993: 23...
...Nor did he take account of the likeworld calls our attention to the rhetoric we inning by inning with care to appear ly opposition of many feminists...
...Here is another elegy in in every Poetry, by printing of the game...
...Why does our society lack such a vocabulary...
...an effective political force...
...John A. McGrath, SM Religious Studies Dept...
...and the ultimate and decion the abortion issue is in the acceptable middle ground...
...They have a convincing Duke University Press, $14.95, 268 pp...
...But he of contemporary poetry...
...test to come in, knows the condition that women to make their own choice...
...Things," and "The Tongue of High Coy...
...white dishes...
...Hall does not eschew the ordinary...
...a similar curve with the may be a number of recent books that have thought of Barth and Bonhoeffer in ProtIr he language of compromise sought, with varying success, to find some estant circles...
...conclusion, the danger of language's mis- go on to lose the Series in the seventh Every possible way to a compromise souse should not be underestimated...
...As in "Another Elegy" and "Baseory and practice of baseball, through med- rhetoric of praise and blame distorts the ball," the state of contemporary poetry itations obliquely related to the 9 x 9 x 9 remembered life...
...Hall's of the rotted year...
...J. Bryan Hehir Bishop Thomas J. Gumbleton with workshops from: Sidney Callahan Christine Firer Hinze Wendy Bauers Northup November 5 - 7, 1993 and others...
...natural law thought, heavily Catholic in Playing an important supportive role its inspiration...
...The legal scholar, Laurence line Protestantism...
...Appearing in the "notes" allegories that so often infest literary ver- tribution to poetry's conversation about the section of The Museum of Clear Ideas, this sions of baseball...
...Hall deplores careless, would not warm to that word "discourthe falsity of what he calls "The Jargon of thinking again how Carlton Fisk age...
...topic, with a particular focus on the theElizabeth Mensch and Alan Freeman Now, however, the possibility of com- ological debate...
...Mensch and Freeman pursue that question as insightfully as any who THE POLITICS OF VIRTUE focused agenda that could translate into have written on this much-written-about Is Abortion Debatable...
...BOOKS A poke over the wall Donald Hall's new book of THE MUSEUM OF CLEAR IDEAS on their characteristic relations to time and poems, The Museum of New Poems to human means of marking time...
...Then they died...
...If you're near a organizing conceit with an outline of home er season: major league stadium, you're probably plate...
...0 also, and most tellingly, have a fine eye for postwar theological and cultural developments...
...Poets build shrines to themthis fashion the shape of the sequence in- of William Trout selves, structs its imagined reader in the pace(s) like Lenin...
...ciently flexible to accommodate the modthe endings that herald our own foregone Do I need to point out that the Red Sox erate approach he seemed to be seeking...
...he in"Come on, Donald-everyone has a `dream team...
Vol. 120 • September 1993 • No. 16
