'Eating of Illusion'
STEPANCHEV, STEPHEN
'Eating of Illusion' COUNTRY WITHOUT MAPS: NEW POEMS By Jean Garrigue Macmillan. 82 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by STEPHEN STEPANCHEV Author, "American Poetry Since 1945: A Critical...
...And would do so now but that Another wind blows And I ache with the water over the stones...
...She banishes them from her room, but they clamor to come in to the light...
...In general, Miss Garrigue does a better job of poems dealing with New York and other American places than with touristy poems about France and Italy...
...She notes the splendor, but she also notes the waste, by which she means change, time, and death...
...The characteristic tensions of the poet's work can be found in one of her best lyrics, "Her Spring Song," which was inspired by her mother...
...There are broken bridges and deserted towns and an allusion to the history of the country, "The Sieges, the Plague, the Wars of Religion...
...Let me in, let me in from the dark," they cry...
...It is a dramatic monologue of an aging woman planting rose bushes in spring and thinking back on her illusioned youth, when she had "enchanted eyes" and lived "unwarily" and "Took so much to heart/It pulled the strings apart...
...The intensity of her joy requires, I think, a full awareness of the desolation of the land, of the presence of death...
...In the best poems in her new book Miss Garrigue recognizes the density of rocks, walls, and death...
...It describes the poet's visit with a companion to a town in Provence lodged high in virtually inaccessible mountains...
...Here the poet successfully fuses the polarities of her vision and achieves moments of grandeur, but the poem, as a whole, represents much too long a ramble for the increments of in sight that it affords...
...With characteristic patience and integrity, Jean Garrigue has perfected her art over the years, producing a remarkable body of work that puts her in the company of the very best poets of her generation...
...dramatized, and made moving and true again...
...In her playful "Invitation to a Hay," for example, the invitation to love is made poignant through the "I" character's realization that she lives in a dream: My dear, and will you be Content to dwell with me Eating of illusion Daily and nightly...
...He sees, or thinks he sees, a collection of elements that suggests perfection, a rose of the senses, and is moved to joy or ecstasy which is made almost unbearable by the realization that it is an illusion that disintegrates even as it is experienced...
...Eating of Illusion' COUNTRY WITHOUT MAPS: NEW POEMS By Jean Garrigue Macmillan...
...Miss Garrigue cherishes the illusion without committing herself to it...
...What we're burning in,/To our splendor and our waste...
...the poverty of soil,/lndeed, these very deprivations, that struggle/Being necessary for their perfection of a few days...
...Reviewed by STEPHEN STEPANCHEV Author, "American Poetry Since 1945: A Critical Survey" READING Jean Garrigue's poems, one enters a world dominated by an imagination that keeps transmuting base metals into gold, keeps weaving enchantments, and assigns rich and strange epithets to ordinary mortals like Colette: "Minister of birds, islands and pools,/Familiar of shade by the hushed walk of sedges.' This sort of romantic excess can be misleading, however, as to Miss Garrigue's true character as a poet, for she has a keen sense of reality and can think...
...Only the spiders wait...
...In one of the most moving poems in the book, called simply "Poem,' she spins an extended metaphor, turning moths into follies...
...Her major theme-evident in all four collections of her poems-is the tragic tension that every man feels between the flatteries of the ideal and the disenchantments of the real...
...The contrasts of the poem are the familiar, age-old contrasts of lyric poetry, but here they are revitalized...
...Unlike Marguerite Young, who insists not only that men live by illusions but also that reality itself is an illusion, Miss Garrigue is fully aware of the factual world beneath and around the dream...
...But the trouble with the poem is that the 'I' character, delighted by the presence of her lover as she tramps through the French country side, fails to see what she looks at...
...In her profound understanding of the war of opposites in all human experience, the poet proves herself superior to most of her writing contemporaries...
...The book is certainly worth reading and studying...
...The reality gives the dream its sweetness...
...In speaking of the death of her cat, she notes "death's filthy sport...
...These are mentioned casually, as though they had made no impres sion on the speaker, as though they did not belie her phrase, "unsullied country...
...It has truth, dazzling imagery, and the sweetness of meter expertly handled...
...The longest and most ambitious poem in the book is entitled "Pays Perdu...
...In the concluding line of the poem she speaks of "An unsullied country, almost beyond the stars," an observation that fails to tally with the details that she reports earlier in the poem...
...One has a similar sense of the power of reality, of "necessity," in "New York: Summertime,' where the poet speaks respectfully of that which "was before we chose...
...They operate with the metaphysical finality of a poem by W. B. Yeats in his last years, when he responded to the world with passion even as he saw it most clearly...
...2S When the poet fails, it is because she forgets the dark realities and abandons herself to an unbelievable ecstasy...
...She replies: "But I have put out the fire, my...
...For this reason her vision is tragic, and the people in her poems are, in a sense, tragic heroes, not gargoyles...
...And in characterizing the man who keeps caged birds in his room, she remarks that he is himself in prison and longs for a "free day(No longer tied to dying...
...Dears...
...Her poem "Remember That Country' has won a great deal of praise for its imaginery and mellifluous lines, and it is, indeed, beautiful, as this passage testifies: Do you remember those dis carded old bridges Still sustaining substantially Spans tor mere marguerites to take, In such slow travel, along with the poppies, Where wagons and horsemen once went...
...Aware of her declining present, she longs to recapture the springs of her past, when she "danced" as she walked: Ah...
...Moreover, it contains a great deal of description and not enough story, which is the soul of narrative poetry...
...She finds the village precariously alive in an inhospitable environment, like flowers "Resisting the aridity, the cold nights...
Vol. 48 • October 1965 • No. 21
