Three Poets
WEISS, NEIL
Three Poets By Neil Weiss Contributor to "Poetry" "Accent" MARYA ZATURENSKA is a poet of fantastic gentleness, full of womby web, a Cocteau-like mood of slow-motion, a world of Gothic ghost,...
...An exquisite poet, Miss Zaturenska is no hallucinated howler or charlatan with ectoplasm in her hand...
...Once new and unexplained...
...But you are curious, remembering that you once idly turned the pages of the last volume of Stephens's poems published way back in 1938, Kings and the Moon...
...Poets, unlike panhandlers, usually have different approaches and work different streets...
...You pay only the bookstore price...
...For his work was done, and he Rested in eternity...
...By Louise Bogun...
...Raphael, came singing down, Welcoming their ancient peer...
...So you start to read, curious, a little prejudiced, remembering that this is the Irish poet famous for his prose fantasy, "The Crock of Gold," expecting a windfall of elves, fairies, pixies, wee people and what-not...
...Here is Part 23 of "Theme and Variations": "The spring, And He, The Watcher of the Race...
...The printed page gives back Words by another hand...
...THE BOOKMAILER, Box 101, New York 16 1 Selected Poems...
...When you feel the heft of this full-dress, 363-page, new, revised and enlarged edition of James Stephens's Collected Poems,3 you wonder: Why did they dig all that up...
...Who bears life As a mask Upon a face, "He goeth not...
...And your infatuate eye Meets not itself below: Strangers lie in your arms As I lie now...
...Miss Zaturenska's masterpiece in this very welcome edition of Selected Poems'is probably "The Lunar Tides," in which Keats's "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" or Robert Graves's recently resurrected "White Goddess" rides again...
...3.00...
...Making everything afraid...
...But this book will probably outlast most of the reputations inflated beyond his...
...Crying on the frightened air, Making everything afraid...
...Stephens proceeds from this remarkable tone of little-boy pathos to a kind of spareness of complicated statement that would be remarkable in any time...
...Le secret douloureux qui me faisait languir...
...And they seated him beside One who had been crucified...
...The poems seem to be victories, not only won but won through...
...Little One...
...Oh, Little One...
...And I cannot find the place Where his paw is in the snare...
...Stephens is no longer with us...
...Who knows anything about anything in this Age of Publicity...
...363 pp...
...Three Poets By Neil Weiss Contributor to "Poetry" "Accent" MARYA ZATURENSKA is a poet of fantastic gentleness, full of womby web, a Cocteau-like mood of slow-motion, a world of Gothic ghost, spirit-shadow or, as she puts it, "lunar swoon...
...BY Marya Zaturenska...
...The lucid flower is named...
...And to him from out the sun Came his father and his friend, Saying,??Now the work is done Enmity is at an end...
...Wrinkling up his little face...
...And I cannot find the place...
...There is a rabbit in a snare: Now I hear the cry again, But I cannot tell from where...
...Uriel, without a spear...
...we believe, submit and participate in the authentic shudder and spell, the poem "grown iridescent for a shadow's sake...
...Noonday,127 pp...
...One is amazed to see a growing similarity to the work of William Carlos Williams...
...Using regular rhyme and meter to make a deceptively simple container for powerful emotion that seems to demand it, Miss Bogan's poetry has won wide admiration??even from poets who don't work her traditional street??for a very good reason...
...Or,as Miss Zaturenska says in "Cold Morning Sky": "The soul within its sheath Explains,endures,interprets all the bliss...
...The One, The Witness, Knower of the Plot...
...Here is a poem that tells something about Stephens himself and what he achieved...
...Her quiet is painfully accurate...
...The more she rages, the quieter she gets...
...In this poem, she puts up a fight against her paralyzing muse, the "vampire moon that draws the blood from your unwilling body,' and the friction brings heat, dispels the vapors that cling about some of her work: "Resistance dies,is plucked so gently from Our paralyzed wills, we hardly know it gone...
...3.50...
...Catalogue on request...
...But I cannot tell from where He is calling out for aid...
...Grove...
...5.00...
...It is full of disturbing thought of a more secular kind, stubborn truth, human frustration??all transmuted into pithy, laconic but very powerful poems: "The woman who has grown old And knows desire must die, Yet turns to love again, Hears the crows' cry...
...Any book reviewed in this Book Section (or any other current book) supplied by return mail...
...We pay the postage, anywhere in the world...
...And He guided Satan to Paradises that He knew...
...Here are the last stanzas of "Man Alone'': "The glass does not dissolve: Like walls the mirrors stand...
...he died in 1950...
...Louise Roman's work" is quite different from Miss Zaturenska's in that it's hard and tough, with a clarity of outline suggesting the English poets of the seventeenth century...
...His "Theme and Variations," written after receiving Stephen MacKenna's English translation of Plotinus, may be the greatest philosophic poem of our half-century, a masterpiece...
...If some of the early poems verge on the cute, yet when successful they extrude things like this little masterpiece of delicate feeling, "The Snare": "I hear a sudden cry of pain...
...I am searching everywhere...
...It is called "The Fullness of Time": "On a rusty iron throne, Past the furthest star of space, I saw Satan sit alone, Old and haggard was his face...
...Marmillan...
...We are surrendered to the moon: The light compels us, pole-stars to its orbit We shine in darkness fixed, invisible, Too late for the last withdrawal we are lost In the intricacies of yellow frost...
...But soon you are interested, then you are absorbed, fascinated and read with the closest attention, ending up with a positive admiration, even love, for this neglected and heroic figure of modern poetry...
...What could be more simple, or more effective...
...You must quietly and humbly subject yourself to the book, to Stephens's book...
...This book is a life...
...Her work seems to be evidence of a kind of brilliant application of the art of desperation to our own time...
...Though vulnerable and unfashionable, her work is beautifully made and so deeply felt that the intensity works its own miracle...
...Her poems are coated with what may be called anterior stuff and issue from what Baudelaire pointed to in his famous sonnet, "La Vie Anterieure...
...And who couldn't see and feel this sudden intrusion of fatality and insight: "Far back, we saw, in the stillest of the year, The scrawled vine shudder, and the rose-branch show Red to the thorns, and, sharp as sight can bear, The thin hound's body arched against the snow...
...As he cries again for aid...
...By James Slepheus...
...The trivial is included with the profoundly-felt...
...Gabriel, without a frown...
...3 Collected Poems...
...2 Collected Poems: 1923-53...
...His growth, his singleminded addiction to his craft, his struggle against neglect and poverty shine through...
...Even an inveterate city-dweller who has never been to the zoo, or never seen the raucous and derisive crow flap a wing, could catch the "Bronx cheer" in those few lines...
Vol. 37 • October 1954 • No. 43
