The Values of the Tentative

...The love of medium is basically sophisticated: With it come all the complexities, the requirements of tact, an ingestion of difficulties, and the esoteric rapture of repeating labors...

...There willows clove the bluish heal By dropping leaf or two, gold green And every tuft of the hill beyond Stood bright, distinct, as if preserved By glass that sealed out light but not Its gold or influence . . Compare this with the last of the new group, "The Flux of Autumn...

...Her tendency is away from any group identity, and in the overall mood of her poems, there is a subtle steering aside from clear-cut or conclusive opinions...

...In her earliest poems, the signature was strong...

...Meer...

...of the early Available Now: Additional Copies of THE NEW SOVIET SOCIETY (a 256-page paperback) 1 Copy .75c 100 copies .$60 500 copies .$275 23 ''Song," and later, in "New York Summertime," the orgiastic "Your forced elations that like rockets burst /Their salvos upon nothingness love, sex, death, the destructive atomizing qualities of self are seen through to their broader aspects...

...Attractiveness speaks for itself...

...There are poems from five substantial books and, in addition, the equivalent of an entire volume of new poems...

...What the poet has worked through, and turned to advantage, is not only a quick responsiveness to experience, but an intellectuality that perceives in the poem its underlying motives...

...Every time I reach the section beginning, "History is time and it assailed us," I am astonished at the momentum and rise...

...Anyone acquainted with Jean Gar-rigue's other volumes will find here a pronounced, and even stronger, impress of individuality...

...The earlier "Fable of Berries" is similarly open and inhabitable: "It is this that happens in the wind-wrapt morning/When the berries are ripe near Margaretville...

...In response to her brilliant, scathing...

...Miss Garrigue's penchant for mutabilities, especially in such poems as "Cortege for Colette," "There is a Dark River," and "The Flux of Autumn, suggests some sources undiluted: not only her strong sense of poetic standards but a purity of defiance against idioms of the simplex as well...

...We are in a new place, we see a new horizon...

...It seems to me that, unlike many contemporary poets, Jean Garrigue is never liable, stylistically, to paint herself into a corner...

...Water, the regenerative source, is held in the mouths of gods, "our great friends of love and rage...

...Once that "phantasmal space" is departed from, there are "no maps" for returning...

...one may not deny, in a number of her insights, the sudden Baudelairian chill...

...This book is a landmark in the production of an important poet...

...And when we speak of Garrigue's "devotion" to style, we are unconsciously resounding to something more than style...

...The selection and arrangement are timely and cohesive...

...In this poem "Fountains are our volatile kin...

...In "The Fountains and Fountaineers of Villa d'Esta," "the fireworks of water," "the tumults of vapor," the sense of the "tangled abyss" are words not only of a precise order, a true description and believable response having to do with an Italian fountain, but psychologically they sound as the poet's second voice...

...One of the joys of the world is to discover that consistency is not born of accident, or a trick...

...While she incorporates concern, delight, sexual beauty, daemonic humors, individual agonies (note "Police of the Dead Day"—a stunning entry into the lawless alley worlds of civilized consciousness) her best sense is for the ultimately athematic...

...It is not by chance, therefore, that Jean Garrigue has written so compellingly of fountains...

...This, we can call a dedication...

...the other is through what the work means to us, independent of coteries, the numbers game, or anyone's programmatic push to top the "latest...

...Thus the feel is for the richness of her line...

...Very vital...

...The meaning of the poem erupts like a fountain, spilling on all sides...

...Paradoxical as it may sound, if poetry has in the modern world any of the old sense of "escapism," the escape, by consensus, must be escape to reality...

...There is a forward impulse carried by a series of excited syllables, a debris of images, and clusters of active colors: "From wayward, tall, exultant, sap-soaked green/A hardy brambled green that founders us/Into this umbre sombre, earth-dark thing...

...But she underscores a continuous and potent truth that leads, sometimes, through avenues of mordant, evil scope...

...It has been remarked how ably she is attached to the "intense particular," or that she is a poet "profoundly in love with her medium...

...the much anthologized "From Venice Was That Afternoon...

...may seem absurd...

...Jean Garrigue is impatient of the ungifted...

...One thinks of Emerson's idea of "the infinitudes of the private man...

...The best poets know the score and usually never tell...

...One is through the artist's own commitments, self-imposed criteria and aims...

...they prepare for the possibility of the more, for the generously phenomenal?the high-bent house," "the brown river visible," "snow balls, white against porous bells of the cloud, "an uprooted railroad bed," "the spectacular flood of a mountain"—all of which come in a single second stanza...

...we are given to ascertain something "Like a clarity of being become/A concordance, an equation, this light/With the soul transformed in its chamber...

...People raised on advertising, abc McLuhanisms and laboratory sex will lament, in this work, an absence of harsh banalities...

...Typical of the poet is a sense of dual sys-tems: Miss Garrigue invites us to a state of perilous attention toward what we will confront, or what we must imagine...

...This is spiked with the kind of anguish that makes experience both rational and irrational, "To be so caught/By all this phantomed streaming forth/It seems a greater phantom is at work...

...Take, from 1944...

...It will support, like music with a penchant for the orchestral, a variety of outlooks...

...The breadth is achieved technically by metaphor and end-statement, or by skillfully interlacing unexpected parallel data throughout the poem's syntax...

...When remembered, or seen at a distance, "Those intricate thoughts, those elaborate emotions," the peaks where such things are, cannot be distinguished from the clouds that surround them...

...in Miss Garrigue, what comes through is a sense of fullness...

...But, as Jorge Luis Borges has said, "Reality is always anachronous...

...What Miss Garrigue manages here is a triple exposure of the workings of the inner mind...

...The poem is among the book's finest, a sort of inverse "Kubla Khan" with terrifying, surreal grandeurs...

...There is an explosive containment in Miss Garrigue's work...

...Its problematical and yet unaffected obliquities of line are, oddly in their way, too liquid to be idiosyncratic: From Venice was that afternoon Though it was our land's canal we viewed...

...The two insights coincide, and neither is simple...

...This requires a supple line, a rhythm that does not limit the poet to irony or the personal lyric...

...The complications burgeon enormously...

...Suggested, too, in the pang and triumph, is the idea that our thoughts represent an instant in a greater organism which will not be understood, or resolved...

...In some artists this could arouse an inhibiting conflict...

...Or is the better word esprit...

...They are gods who "stand there, they linger,/They recline, they preside, in languor or rigors . . . ." And "Passion stares into their empty eyes...

...They are release that may come by artifice...

...The musical and limpid do not deceive...

...The latter is about a walk through autumn woods...

...What we feel is her pursuit, her fearless confrontation of multitudes...

...The images are intimate and silken, "A secret thing on shuttling element/Adrift and of an eastern stamp...

...What appears to be, in Miss Garrigue's early work, a chance exuberance, a venturesome idea or verbal shock, turns out to be essential, the unveiling of a thought...

...Her verbal colorations reflect this essential concern for the values of the tentative...

...Indeed, what we are allowed is a verbal expansiveness that makes possible (as well as room for) tragic themes, the accretion of spontaneous allegories, the inclusion of dramatic incident—all with remarkable ease...

...The land, the people are indefinably timeless, meaningful and humane...

...In a burst, we comprehend the symbolism...

...It depends, also, on what symbols we are amenable to...

...What then is the modern eye to see...

...Its pose is that of art...

...These lines, too, are from the 1944 poem...

...She resists the scandalous, the cryptic and confessional...

...We experience the force and beauty of the "unmitigated flood...

...The subject is, presumably, a dream in which—as the poem evolves—one is viewer, participant and interpreter...

...As in the ecstatic "O beautiful, my relic bone...

...In the New and Selected Poems we are presented with the viable...

...Yet she is not out to sell excitement, for the poems are under no compulsion to vulgarize their content...

...And this is where Miss Garrigue's poems relate...

...we can only guess how it was done from how it "comes out...

...This view, oddly, outmodes any mechanical thinking about the future...

...Let us say, the aim is serious...

...One of the requisites, I fancy, for living through like "equations" would be, for her or any modern poet, a prime gift of energy...

...What yields fecundity to the disorders is the extent of Miss Garri-gue's philosophic changes and her mysterious verbal allusions to certain concepts once believed in, to be believed again or not—in sum, her audacity of language...

...The lines extend, spread to the look of prose, yet keep their original elements, as if we had physically come to space and a high plateau...

...The experience is of people with a perfect naturalness, a land of pride and omnipresent decay...

...What, for instance, can be made of the poem, first in the new group, "The Dream...

...In her work, intentionally or not, there is a strong investment of modern psyche: By the nature of its kaleidoscopics, we may experience our own dimensions, we are plunged into a sense of the inherent real...

...Tonalities slide, they adhere, they touch profundities and depart...

...A case in point is Miss Garrigue's long narrative "Pays Perdu," which has the hit and savor of speech, together with a warm Odyssean amble...

...Of course, it is not possible to tabulate the shadings of any conclusive present...

...Yet as images accumulate, we are swung into another arc of human consciousness...

...But we also know, art propagates by example...

...Each work has an amazing bearing on the whole...

...While it is grave and beautiful, there are surges of intelligent nightmare—to be differentiated, I might add, from our current and sentimental psycho-pathologies...

...It is also a fascinatingly sustained enactment of spirit in the clutch of mortality...

...From the very start, there is a flexibility in phrasing ("As if we had composed the day/With the sleeping unseen at the back of the mind . . ") so that the poem can change pace in the middle...

...Where others fall into experimental or academic axiom, Miss Garrigue, either by temperament or esthetics, gracefully eludes the trap...

...The poem is about a lost community in the mountains beyond Provence...

...We recognize as well that their form (discipline...

...A basic quality that emerges in Jean Gar-rigue's New and Selected Poems is a sense of remove from market place considerations, coupled with a sense of the work's moving on its own into the dark and insatiable surge of the modern mind (possibly because it keeps, in the main, rigorously clear of current and subjective fare...

...Only a physicist, or a mathematician could imply those autonomous fractions...

...Reviewed by JANE MAYHALL Author, "Ready for the Ha Ha'' There are, perhaps, only two just approaches to an achieved body of art...

...We see "Its blind waters tranquilly stemming there...

...All a poet or visual artist can do, finally, is depict...

...Notwithstanding the vital images of the poem, we are brought to realize that what has provided the illumination (that is, the joy and wisdom imparted by the sight of the fountains), what has given us the profundity is, after all, a disinterested force: It is reciprocal to our "want...

...A Note on La Fontaine"—where she switches the moral perspective, making the grasshopper noble and doomed, the ant drab and surviving —those of us who must, like the ant, exist as "righteous dullards" might long to plead our case...

...We journey through lightness and tension, whether on Bleecker Street or before a European painting ("A Figure for J.V...

...We are at the doors of an ingenious truth...

...As with "From Venice Was That Afternoon," the impression is of exuberance, which gives a sense of flow, but never eludes the mind's participation in physical realities: "The leaves that dappled on that breast/The five-sensed image of our pleasance/Have now destroyed its lineaments...

...Using the unencumbered dreams that accompany our lives of passion, though, the possibility of unmasking lives within lives, dreams within dreams, is tremendous...

...Her work reminds us of another and happy idea—that poetry is not a proving but a climate...

...Her prosody, not too tightly-knit, is fortunate to her style...