An Altogether Different Language by Anne Porter
Ponsot, Marie
BOOKS Step-dancing on a high wire An Altogether Different Language Anne Porter Zoland Books, $16.95,116 pp. Marie Ponsot Anne Porter's An Altogether Different Language is a work of great...
...Her diction is Theresian, in a rather small middle range, with a ready music of assonance...
...She discerns in them "that secret praise/Which burns in every creature...
...More, it is a working faith, from which Porter tries to realize daily consequences...
...Like the tunic of Saint Francis in the luminous "Song for the Town of Assisi," the poems are "Reproach and treasure...
...Part of the power of her work is that it looks easy, as when we watch someone walk confidently forward across the ground...
...A List of Praises" celebrates earth's music: 'The skirling of seagulls," "the rasp and sizzle of crickets, katydids, and cicadas," peepers' "shimmer of bell-like cries...
...The power implied in the fine title poem, "An Altogether Different Language," is angelic, not one Porter claims for herself...
...For one thing, these are lyrics of praise for a world that is praiseworthy because it is created...
...It is an instantly recognizable pitch, refined by the framing and point of her view...
...In 'Tor My Son, Johnny," however, all is unpacked, explicit, its concrete instances chosen by heart and by wit, to evoke a keen sense of a person the speaker loves...
...In "Leavetaking" Porter adds, to the work of praise, her wise exploration of what it is to be old-a field where few of the discoveries peculiar to poetry have yet been made: Nearing the start of that mysterious last season Which brings us to the close of the other four, I'm somewhat afraid and don't know how to prepare So I will praise you...
...In a perfectly realized elegy/eulogy, "For My Son Johnny," Porter prays to her dead child as to a heavenly intercessor...
...Again she tries, in conceiving her calling as poet in terms of the Pasture Rose, rosa humilis, "a small peasant rose...
...Her most recent book of poetry is The Green Dark (Knopf...
...Landscapes and events shine in Porter's words for the real world...
...David Shapiro's introduction to her book is, in its way, as unusually excellent as the poems...
...The There-sian way joins the way of Saint Francis (and perhaps Saint Bonaventure's Way of the Mind to God, which cherishes a consciousness grounded in recognizing vestiges of the holy everywhere...
...American poetry flourishes in rich variety, as its parameters expand...
...She tries, not to interrogate or subvert them, but to recall us to what the songs tell us they saw: "as the angels told us, He shines in a dark valley...
...Readers of Commonweal (where Anne Porter's poems have for a decade freshened the air and heightened the light) know already that these poems are unmatched...
...Bloy and Bernanos, Peguy and Claudel wrote from just such a foundation a generation or two ago...
...Marie Ponsot Anne Porter's An Altogether Different Language is a work of great refreshment...
...Well modulated, it is the pitch of a dynamic and transfiguring equanimity...
...Reproach," for some of us, may lie in our failure- never hers!-to see in each creature the presence of praise...
...Her language is not angelically disembodied but human, and markedly hers...
...Autumn Crocus" zeroes in from a wide spectacle of fall to where "the earth/breathes out the unearthly blossoms/Of the autumn crocus/Around the tool-shed door...
...They are prayer-like or biblical, in that she is sure we can call concrete cases to mind when she says, "the wounded," "the old," "the poor...
...It remains to read the poems, and see...
...For another, Porter is a poet of faith...
...It's her daring that does it, as she risks what our generation cannot abide, sentimentality...
...not worldly, not naive...
...She always escapes that, not by overriding irony, but by modesty that sustains her in reporting her emotional truth, as in the poignant ending: Now you're with Mary, whose starry veil you loved, And of whom you said, "She won't get bored with my puns," And "She won't mind if I touch her dress...
...But even he falls short...
...Marie Ponsot lives in New York City...
...I'll try,' she says at Christmas, "to catch up with the shepherds...
...It is not political or argued...
...I try to learn/As if the Lord had told me/listen to the rose/Be the voice of the rose...
...Treasures fill them: a tree, a bird, Long Island, Chartres, Easter, a kind neighbor, a brave servant...
...With this poem the book achieves its apex of intimacy...
...It may be our hearts are restless until they rest in this way...
...we may perceive she has achieved her notable equipoise while step-dancing on a tight wire, strung high outside the conventional demotic nets of her fellow poets...
...A central lightness and freshness perdure, mysterious...
...While your mother, who sometimes did get bored with your puns, Cries here on earth And asks you, now that you're one of the greatest, To grant her a portion of your littleness...
...Even so, this book is extraordinary, a rare flight...
...She has a gift for sketching a panorama, then focusing on a close view in lovely cadences of conclusion...
...And it is unmistakable...
...Self-described as "a man without money or power," he loved woods, fields, God...
...he was angry, tender, awkward, dear...
...They debate nothing, and express no issue narrower than faith in love and its praise...
...References, lexicon, scenes, and persons are refracted through a Catholic belief free of doubt or contention...
...In phrasing and structure, many poems are, like prayers, addressed elsewhere, for us to overhear...
...To do so, she names crows, buttercups, her childhood, smashed glass, and blue chicory...
...How she does it, how this most sophisticated person marshals her sophistication to order the apparently simple lines, can't be pinpointed...
...Praise, especially grateful praise, is a mode dreadfully long out of fashion...
...Elsewhere, Porter may use a shorthand of generalizations at times...
...Her poems are floral and tuneful, responsible and unprotected...
...Its choices of inclusion and exclusion are moved by the received faith of Catholic spirituality...
...She builds in none of the usual defenses (obscurity, discontinuity, self-mockery, self-pity...
...Porter's tact in revealing his innocent life is absolute...
...Glance again, though, at Anne Porter crossing the stages of this world, and who knows...
...The poem turns up other important themes, too: life after death, the natural world, the worth of littleness...
...Prayer of praise then shifts to petition: "I thank you for that secret praise/Which burns in every crea-ture,/And I ask you to bring us to life/Out of every sort of death/And to teach us mercy...
...But Porter's understanding is fresh, American, womanly, and her own...
...Porter's work finds itself, I think, on the little way of Therese de Lisieux-a way of local, child-small, I-Thou acts and gestures, none easy, all unpretentious...
...What generates her wonderful tone is faithfulness to the terms and occasions of belief native to her...
...It is cogent, eloquent, true, and not to be missed...
Vol. 122 • November 1995 • No. 20
