Climbing Parnassus

...Exiles," a phantasmagoric story of annihilation, begins by echoing Job's messengers?Only they had escaped/to tell us how/the house had gone/and things had vanished"-and proceeds in the fashion of dreams to recount missed trains and absent landmarks, until only the messengers' voices "were left./telling the story./And after the story,/their voices were gone...

...Contemplating those tragicomedies of aging in which panicky forays for love couple with the decreasing ability of flesh and heart to perform, the poet's voice is wracked by premonitions of "Despair that dares to call itself desire,/The endless night that nevertheless ends" once and for all in death-even less desirable than any indignities of living...

...In The Monument (Ecco, 52 pp., $7.95) Strand reaches a pinnacle of wit...

...The degradations Eros subjects us to are painfully dwelt on...

...In a departure from the novel, Hine's hero feels affection-even some attraction-for his monster/double...

...The beautiful "Blight on Elm" laments these disease-ravaged trees as "a redundant proof,/As if we needed one, of death," and ends with deep melancholy, Only in the medium of dream Does there exist an afterlife Where they return and we regain our youth "Coma Berenices" envisions the terminal stages of an attachment-once "a landmark in love's perihelion"-In terms of the cooling stages of the solar cycle...

...It displays a tone previously missing in Strand's voice-a compassion for others...

...Rather less characteristically, this same poem, and many others in The Late Hour, end on a very different note, insisting that "we come back whole/to suck the sweet marrow of day," or that "Even this late the bones of the body shine/and tomorrow's dust flares into breath...

...As the year moves toward winter, "I can feel my heart becoming dormant/Along with every other living thing/Animals who find in hibernation/An alternative to suffering...

...The Monument might be an allegory of many things...

...Curiosity is never satisfied...

...The title of his sixth, The Late Hour (Atheneum, 48 pp., $6.95), as well as the headings of each section: "Another Place," "From the Long Sad Party," "Poor North," and "Night Pieces" still bear witness to the characteristically wistful tone of Strand's fantasies, where everthing is gradually withdrawn or cast aside...

...This long prose poem, couched as an essay on immortality from a writer to his future translator, opens disarmingly: "Let me introduce myself...

...It is night...

...The exiles rediscover themselves in a country of "radiance without hope," so coming back "into the night of their origin," they find everything restored to its proper place: "the return of their story/to where it began," the self returned to itself...

...Alas: it is a devastated country," begins "A Trophy," where "not one tree" ft seems survives unscathed the sudden blast Of infatuation, which has done its worst at last...

...Hine takes the formal techniques of his craft very seriously, He is prosody's supreme artisan since the death of Auden, and shares with that much-missed voice an urbane wit that reminds us what a delight to the intellect such poetry can be...

...Frankenstein's Farewell" embroiders on Mary Shelley's horror story: Forward as a schoolboy, backward as a bride, He hid inside the wardrobe to deride My habits, the amenities that hide The terror that wefeel of the outside...

...This sense of the interrelation between form and subject permits Hine to be confessional without the usual whining or self-indulgence...

...Above all, however, it is another signpost on Strand's road to philanthropy...

...Having renounced or discarded the heavy baggage of human ties to enter the darker part of self, he emerges reborn to explore new possibilities of closeness...

...In his black mood, "Light and dark impartially divided...

...and so on and so forth...

...But this is not the end of their journey, or of the poem...

...Daylight Saving (Atheneum, 56 pp., $6.95), his seventh book of verse, is also his most somber-retrieved light from the winter of discontent...

...Less prone to repeat "the old story" about a man who "says his days/are the real black holes in space...

...In the guise of day and night dispute the world./ Today it looks as if the dark will win/Temporarily, until the solstice /When the light brigade begins again...

...with his third volume of poems, Darker (1970...

...Out of these surrealist narratives of private vision, he addresses-Sometimes gravely, sometimes humorously-the solopsist in us all...

...Its emotional gamut-from hopefulness to hysteria, from uncertainty through depression to assurance -would make a splendid actor's monologue on the order of Cocteau's La Voix Humaine...

...The concluding transformation moves the whole process to the sky (in the constellation of the poem's title) to achieve a Platonic transcendence over matter: That love of which you were the incarnation, Which could not even really spell its name, Idle, illiterate, and infantile, Still in the sky of my imagination Bums with an unmitigated flair, Like a lock of Berenice's hair...

...On Poetry CLIMBING PARNASSUS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Daryl Hine and Mark Strand are both Canadian-born poets recently embarked upon what Dante called "the middle of the journey of our life," and are both exceedingly accomplished-although in quite different fashions...

...The muse who bestows clever gifts on a poet often sees her work perverted by such wicked fairies as Trivializing, Cold Mechanics, or Stunted Emotions...

...perhaps this poet's most impressive accomplishment to date) confronts the problem of trying to free oneself enough from the past to recapture it freshly...

...Disturbingly aware of human perversities, Daylight Saving nevertheless shines with compassion and intelligence...

...Thus Mark Strand and Daryl Hine have something in common besides birthplace, midlife journeys and expertise...

...The presumptuous wish for everlasting fame seems, in this case, to have already been answered, since at the bottom of some pages we find the notes of the hoped-for-translator—unless, of course, author and translator are really one and the same...

...the story I tell/about myself, about you, about everyone," Strand is increasingly inclined to imagine "a light/that would not let us stray too far apart...

...My Optics" observes that just as glasses make allowances for the eye's flawed vision, so "Metrical devices/With corrective lenses/Bring the phrase in focus./Form is recognition/Of an underlying/ Symmetry in something...

...Let experiment decide...

...Strand's spare lyrics, by contrast, create a dreamy world where the self continually discovers the insubstantiality of everything but itself...

...Poor North," six poems dealing with Strand's Canadian memories, further explore this recherche of the past...

...Heartbreak is an inevitable, energetic force like an atomic explosion-the initial Big Bang that formed love's universe?an original /Open universal heart,/A pluperfect, prehistoric whole/Mysteriously smashed at the beginning...

...The pleasure we receive from the cumulative effect of the monorhymes and wordplay melds with the painful implication that whatever we create is a botched copy of ourselves and will come back to destroy us, or to drive us to self-destruction...

...While often deeply moving, it radiates a wit that belies its tragic subject-matter...

...Hine's painful thoroughness in dissecting his anguish comes to have something of the bravery of Darwin scientifically studying his own symptoms-hoping by intellectual discovery to wrest some trophy from the body's dumb suffering...

...In this poem, and in "For Jessica, My Daughter," he has grown gentle...

...A continual threnody of loss and decay runs throughout Daylight Saving...

...I am...

...Now you know more about me than I know about you...

...Remember the creator's hands are tied...

...Now I initiate the suicide Of science, whose conclusions I tried?A failure...

...Both suggest that the darkest hour comes before dawn-that in the lowest depths of our private infernos we may find ourselves suddenly able to start the ascent of that mountain called Parnassus...

...Indeed, the book's subtitle might well be "Brighter," since it is suffused with hopefulness of new dawns...

...Daryl Hine has no truck with these ladies: His sensibility is as lively as his intelligence...

...He is equally adept at synthesizing pathos and humor...

...Yet in dwelling so much on the dark side of Daylight Saving, I have neglected the book's considerable powers of entertainment...

...I feel it is night not because darkness has fallen (what do I care about darkness falling) but because down in myself the shouting has stopped, has given up...

...Ifeel we are night, that we sink into dark and dissolve into night...

...Where Are The Waters Of Childhood...