New York
GARRIGUE, JEAN
ON POETRY By Jean Garrigue New Work This collection of Preludes for Memnon and its companion piece, Time in the Rock, is published now as a single unit for the first time. (Preludes by Conrad...
...The poems of Theodore Weiss (The Medium, Macmillan, 87 pp, $3.95...
...And the poem has its resolution, again, on no forced plane...
...I insist: I will reinvent love,' Miss Hochman writes...
...is the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1965, makes a nice tissue of ambiguities out of a spy plot based on Jean Overton Fuller's Double Webs...
...Preludes by Conrad Aiken, Oxford University Press, 188 pp., $1.65...
...And in "Columbus," one of the new poems, we hear that old prototype: "I'll spread the airy sail,"/He said, "and point the sprit/To a country that cannot fail,/For there's no finding it...
...In his title poem Henri Coulette, whose The War of the Sea-et Agents, (Scribner's, 111 pp., $3.95...
...What is more, he can take the long hard look down Walt's democratic vistas, not excluding the dreams of "mad governors," and for this he has been much praised, his book before this, At the End of the Open Road, having received the Pulitzer Prize...
...Multiplicity of interpretation, multiplicity of meaning in the tireless kaleidoscopic shiftings characterize these two long poems...
...They are soliloquies upon the void in a void, upon that also ambiguity, God, who gives "his world the meaning that we mean," upon self both mocked and haunted by its awareness, and so this music for the absolute makes its serial progress that is likewise a constant turning back on itself, a spiral weaving and re-weaving...
...So her "warriors, tigers, flowers of Delacroix," her angels, her children, her horsemen, her "dream-drenched forests" have the disembodiment of the idealized, the glitter of the abstract...
...Aiken's resourcefulness in keeping this grand continuum going, in pursuing the theme with its endless modulations, is as sovereign as his command of this double view, this over-arching prospect of that space and time collapsing and expanding...
...That its luminosity is opposed in the succeeding section by the flyspecked mundane, a critical and faintly cynical interpretation or "correction" of the same event is typical of the method...
...Weeds, grasses, and all the lovely riff-raff of nature are seen with a particular freshness...
...Of her outright religious poems these lines from "Variations on a Theme by George Herbert" reveal her in one of her purest veins: "After so many deaths to live and write...
...A boiling conflict underneath the surface is usually about to erupt...
...In "As I Forget" he is again very patient and sensitive with his difficult theme of addressing the dead...
...Most of them are in a conversational, informal mode...
...His adroitness in establishing a tone full of many shiftings of overtone is especially shown in the more formal poems such as "The Black Angel," "Cyngets House," "The Fifth Season," "The Attic," where delicacy of imagination, sound and structure make for complex effects that include the tender and the mocking...
...One moves in a kind of Poussin neo-classicism where the apples might be from Hesperides...
...are both airy and substantial: airy because graceful and often sinuous in their shape and working out, and substantial in their sensory denseness, their insistence on the whatness and thisness of things...
...Louis Simpson's ear is also delicate, his "foot" firm...
...Let us be prodigal as nature is,' he says, and so he is...
...are instantly appealing for their frankness and spontaneity, their pain also, and rebelliousness...
...Is it a spoof on a spoof when life seems to be simply imitating a bad movie...
...it is based upon an acceptance of the painful contrasts between past and present, for still "this world endures,' the "towery city" is "still tolled in its towers...
...We are alone, alone with what we are...
...The land is within./At the end of the open road we come to ourselves...
...taken front her six books and covering a span of 30 years, create a mythology of vision consistently compelled...
...Or form seems to amount to a kind of jotting down at a tempo very fast and jazzy...
...The theme of the tired New World, of the American dream "contracted" now by the "realtors,/Pickpockets, salesmen, and the actors performing/Official scenarios" has long been with him, as we see in an earlier poem like "Islanders,' and is still with him in these latest poems...
...But the apple is gnawed by the worm...
...For you have shown what worthy thing it is to furnish grief with all the rage and nettles of this life and yet not yield your pity or your love that like a maddened, aged king so crowned, last manliness achieved., brief sing, the wind, the dust, its daughters, echoing...
...And thus his testament in these long poems to that confrontation...
...But the spirit of the poem as often prevails, and an effect of a beauty whose strange visionary realities of dream are meant to haunt...
...The flat style, the telegraphic short-cuts, the shock of dissociations, the disjunctures of juxtaposition and the kitchen equipment of "prose reality" that poetry is wanting to digest (not heroize)-i.e., TV, cars, bulldozers, spacemen-is not for her...
...To read in these Preludes is to experience an agonizing sense of the cosmos, on a course that reels from pole to pole and reels, moreover, from the heights without to the depths within, from self and its "multitude of the self" to the vastitudes that enclose it, from the mind that is its own eternity and cosmos to the vertigos, the abysses of space and time that it is its own power to conceive of...
...She wants a fullphrased clarity, a resolute whole in a formal manner...
...Aiken can match beauty with grandeur, like the master of language that he is...
...it is the work of a sharp restless eye and intelligence...
...Or from: Is he not perfect, walks he not divinely With a light step among the stars his fathers With a quick thought among the seeds his sons to: Are we Caligulas, that we command Even our privies to remember us...
...Weiss reaches at an exalted view with artful ease and simplicity...
...Thou subtle God of Visions who hast led My footsteps to this room, this hour, this night That I might testify my resurrection...
...Formal in a "free" way, his poems have a quirky music with much close sounding of consonants and vowels...
...There is an acerb, clipped but not quite dry quality in his work...
...But the landscape is enameled...
...LXXXIX from Time in the Rock that begins: "It was the departure, the sun was risen," is as beautiful as any of these better known ones...
...And in other poems Coulette is as masked and ironical, so detached that the detachment itself makes for an effect of sheer angst...
...This highly contemporary nervy discontinuity -the jumping from point to point to make a pointserves to give a kind of crazy, breakaway energy to her autobiographical, psychological little cinemas of crisis...
...Or free associations suggesting the desperations or near hysterias of characters about to be overcome...
...Various parts of the Preludes have been widely anthologized...
...The Attic" concludes: Time and Imagination-what are they...
...And still, the wish for the second chance, the new beginning persists: in California "The great cloud-wagons move/Outward still, dreaming of a Pacific...
...When these two long poems were first published in 1930 and 1932, respectively, "Einstein and Freud with the shadows of Darwin and Nietzsche behind them had suddenly turned our neat little religions or philosophical systems into something that looked rather alarmingly like pure mathematics,' as Aiken writes in his preface...
...She writes for the full rondures of the lyric...
...there is no sharp-eyed inspection...
...Weiss usually favors a compact syntax which keeps him rather out of the conversational school of poetry...
...There is the air about it of a private joke, the maze within the maze, mirrors that mirror mirrors, and malaise...
...Sandra Hochman's poems (The Vaudeville Marriage, Viking, 69 pp., $3.95...
...As in "Hopkins at Oxford,' where an affirmation is achieved that is neither pious nor too worked up...
...They are, my dear, the pseudonyms of Change, The smooth, indifferent author of our play, Master of both the common and the strange...
...It is as much a spectral landscape: Death wearing an "angel's mask...
...My sister, it is autumn in Cockaigne, And we are weary, for we've come so far -Too far to be enchanted by the rain...
...A fine craftsman, he can handle traditional forms with grace, to which is often added mordancy...
...Rather, all is seen in a way to put it into song...
...mockery, the satirical, is a way of dealing with it...
...The title poem, "The Medium,' is about what it is hoped poetry can still become and be a kind of Adam's first speech "nothing but his fundamental voice...
...These Collected Poems by Marya Zaturenska (Viking, 210 pp., $6.00...
...Yes...
...And also: "Whitman was wrong about the People,/ But right about himself...
...Bridges are burning or bleeding, balconies giving away, islands sinking...
...This is certainly a fine idea but Rimbaud said it first...
...Many of her poems are like paintings...
...Through the Strings" develops beautifully out of its material and is a performance on a high level...
...His range is wide in these Selected Poems (Harcourt, Brace & World, 145 pp., $4.95), from lyrics such as "Young women in their April moodiness" to "The Runner," a long brilliant poem on the siege of Bastogne...
...The Open Road goes to the used-car lots...
...The city is usually the scene, its vigorous decadence, while the Self jumps through hoops of fire, performing its antics with bravado...
...The risk is that elegance and grace can sometimes be frozen by the convention itself and that fluency and luster can blur impact...
...Attacking household objects with her dreams,/She takes apart/The night table, the bed, the frying pan, the cups...
...delight and a kind of passionate gentleness-qualities somewhat rare in this wised-up age-characterize his view...
Vol. 49 • May 1966 • No. 10
