Abandoning the Feminine Masks
RATTI, JOHN
Abandoning the Feminine Masks THE WEATHER OF SIX MORNINGS By Jane Cooper Macmillan. 53 pp. $3.95. AFTER THE STRAVINSKY CONCERT AND OTHER POEMS By Constance Hunting Scribners. 73 pp....
...Her book is not the thoroughly professional product Miss Cooper's is, but because of some strong moments, I will perhaps remember it longer...
...Miss Hunting is, in fact, a poet capable of shocking us into awareness...
...What must it be...
...Here her intelligent, tight shorthand is held in perfect tension: All is closed in by an air so rain-drenched the distant barking of tied-up dogs ripples to the heart of the woods...
...Miss Cooper, Miss Hunting, and others like them do not speak with the loud, piping, girl-Portia voice of Edna St...
...And yet there is as much unmistakable femininity in the cloud of damp tweed and good soap hovering about these books as there was in the musky patchouli and exotic filigree of their predecessors...
...Jane Cooper and Constance Hunting emerge in their first collections as members of that particular breed of woman poet which developed in the late '40s and early '50s...
...I think we now listen for those voices that tell us what we do not know and have not begun to imagine...
...The decorative masks and attitudes fancied by earlier generations are gone...
...Although they are annoying when examined closely, they work surprisingly well when they are read at normal speed...
...At second glance, however, Miss Hunting looks better...
...Unfortunately, she has an affinity for rather strained off-rhymes, such as "Curtained, with all the lights on,/I start up—only to sit down...
...The polite family reminiscence, the muted passion, and even-textured language make one wonder if even Robert Lowell's most questionable attribute, the elegant family skeleton poem, is in danger of having a school of its own...
...On first reading After the Stravinsky Concert and Other Poems, I was irritated by her long poems?the title poem, and the ones called "Revenant" and "The Gathering" especially...
...senior editor, Grolier Inc...
...Vincent Millay or weave Marianne Moore's cat's cradles of delicious words...
...For we are no longer content with the poetry of self-expression, no matter how literate that "self' may be...
...Of the two poets, Jane Cooper seems the more secure in her command of her chosen form and subject matter...
...Only a man's voice refuses to be absorbed...
...4.50...
...But there are no surprises in the book...
...In The Weather of Six Mornings (which was the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1968), she speaks of the intimate moments of life, and of nature and the world accepted with grace and understanding...
...And when she tells a horror story, turning the safeness of her world upside down, as in "On the Possible Killing of a Three-Months Child by a Rabbit," one is brought up short: Did the flesh taste sweet, like new lettuce leaves, wild onions, milky as white rose petals...
...In a society where clothing and even life styles are called—with some justification—uni- or mono-sexual, it is refreshing to find two poets who could never be mistaken for men...
...In her control and in her balanced tone lie both Miss Cooper's assets and liabilities...
...Miss Cooper is at her best in the title poem...
...They have abandoned as well much of the synthet-tic, neopagan sexuality of H.D...
...Reviewed by JOHN RATTI Author, "A Remembered Darkness...
...The lines are clean and well formed, and the observations, given her frame of reference, seem true and accurate...
...When she tunes her polite, grammatical language to its most stylish pitch—as she does in "At Miss R's"—she is unforgettable: "They say she sometimes sucks a ruby like a plum...
...While they write well enough within their narrow horizons, Miss Cooper's craftsmanship and Miss Hunter's flashes of awareness do not seem to be enough...
...Instead they speak with the firm, no-nonsense, earnest voice of 20th-century academia...
...Constance Hunting, too, has command of a flexible, literate style...
...In the final analysis, though, these collections are typical of the kind of safe academic verse most publishers seem willing to print (aside from the work of elder statesmen like Richard Eberhart and Archibald MacLeish) and thus raise old problems...
...What must poetry do...
Vol. 52 • March 1969 • No. 6
