Sermons in Stones

...Pleased with his good deed, the poet hangs the branch in his room "perhaps to hatch its meaning...

...The ludicrous futility of man's attempts to force nature is matched by his unwillingness to bridge the gulf between the ideal and reality...

...Davison's own voice is remarkably fresh and clear, and his poetry will have a strong appeal to those who have soured on the art since the death of Robert Frost...

...a sea urchin teaches an object lesson in faith—"One can only believe that it does breathe...

...Monkeys are happily free of Christian hatred of the flesh...

...The Dressmaker's Dummy as Scarecrow" provokes the observation that "There is at times a blind-spot in our view/When one sees nothing, is nothing, cannot see/How one has drifted here...

...Howes is preoccupied with keeping in touch with the world, for "How things are, how things/Work, that is the study/Of a happy man...

...this, in turn, conjures the echo of another that "crushes city buildings into rubble,/demolishes the landmarks of a nation/beneath the spiderweb of Brooklyn Bridge...

...it claims a religious consciousness for the man who can attune himself to their harmonies...

...The poet's plea, as lyrical as it is blasphemous, is to Make peace with yourselves, or live locked in such war As, ruinous from the start, Turns dark with pity Jacob's brazen heart...

...One angry poem deplores the self-denial of a young girl, "The New Leda" violated by the life-hating God of Judaeo-Christian tradition...

...Instead, he states his theme as an attempt to "search through the sounds and sights of nature, family and history to locate the force that operates in our lives—a force that elaborates itself in as many disguises as nature and man can invent for it...

...The poem opens with the sound of a hammer repairing a barn roof...

...Once the center of a prosperous industry, grinding flour for the West India trade, it has become a ruin, reminding us that "Our farms are farmland only in the deed/and finally revert to wilderness/because no one of us has got the heart/to keep his hopes alive...

...This story, found in I Kings 19:7-13, provides the epigraph to Peter Davison's A Voice in the Mountain (Atheneum, 61 pp., $4.95...

...he has none of the nastiness that animates much of Frost at his sharpest...

...Day of Wrath" is a mural of word painting, an abundant catalogue of the images that go to make a rural September day...

...They are catalysts in Our minds...

...Making Much of Orioles" tells of a diseased elm, containing a nest of baby birds, that must be cut down...

...The endless rotation of the seasons was reflected in miniature in the revolutions of its wheel, and the miller himself was not only a "prostitute" to materialism but also a kind of priest: He summoned the fruits of the earth to the shore of the sea...

...With a Brueghelesque eye, Davison picks out minute details, each contributing to a larger moral...

...the adult birds forgo their elm fixation and raise their brood...

...The Fall of the Doll's House" compares the porcelain inhabitants who smile "as though their rage were ruled by music,/the transcendental chords of Plato's dream," to the actual family that made it—people who are subject to all human ills, including impotent anger against a dream too fragile to withstand adversity...

...Peter Davison's verse illuminates the commonplace with a mystical sense of the divine revealed in nature...

...And in a recent work Howes pays fealty to fecund, seaborn Venus, "Morning star at evening," who glorifies the flesh, and makes love an art...

...These primitive forms, models of a mysterious self-containedness, stand for the deep unconscious...

...Even Davison's jeremiads on the rape of land by the machine and its devastating effects on art ("Insularity: or...

...the mill stones, by contrast, made "the tides perform a human service," bringing fruitfulness to the barren marshes...

...But Davison's work is not marked by Yankee crustiness...

...the lonely Pipe Fish eats creatures resembling punctuation marks while writers discuss their trade...

...so let us go Hand over hand back toward The watery skylight, toward land, Afraid only of letting Our subaqueous lifeline go...

...Haskell's Mill," the longest and most ambitious poem in A Voice in the Mountain, is also the most powerful...

...This, combined with his unabashed interest in form, gives his verse an almost 19th-century robustness of purpose, startling in our desiccated and disillusioned era, when the smallest victories are usually won at severe emotional cost...

...She believes every poet must discover some region "that one fits into without having constantly to translate the language of nature surrounding one or the speech of the inhabitants back into one's own language in order to feel at home...

...A strong poet speaks with the incantatory authority of a prophet...

...Like a latter-day Browning, he has an unshakable faith in the goodness of the natural order, no matter how terrible or harsh it appears...

...At last the poet cries out: "If you are granted wishes for the world,/enlarge its scope: make work as one with play/in houses built for everlasting fire/where man and woman burn like seraphim...

...To spare the disconsolate orioles, the poet ties the dead limb with the nest to a neighboring cherry tree...

...The Undersea Farmer," for example, observes islands from below water-level as "pyramids of depth, where old benumbed seas chill the shoals...

...In very different ways, Barbara Howes and Peter Davison write poetry that celebrates the natural order of creation...

...I've tossed the branch behind a lilac bush...

...The final one—a howling yellow dog guarding an empty house—animates the scene with the terror implicit in the poem's title: "His desertedness will never end./No man will cross the road for his relief./His work of watching will go on forever...

...Once the nest is abandoned, it seems "a trophy of something like a victory of will...

...diving for the life around their bases becomes a trope for exploring our own watery origins...

...A Private Signal (Wes-leyan, 181 pp., $8.95) includes a selection of poems from her three principal volumes, a handful of her justly admired translations, and her most recent work...

...I don't know...

...Both are part of a great tradition of poets since Wordsworth who see Nature as a paradigm of wholeness—who, like exiles in the Forest of Arden, find "Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in every thing...

...after these had passed, it came as "a still small voice...

...Set on the salt marshes of West Gloucester, the mill is a relic of the town's history...

...The Undoing of England"), or his satires (on Nixon and Bertrand Russell), have a vigor that knows nothing of Waste Lands...

...it is inspired by the "still small voice" out of the Holy Mountain...

...Doll's houses as well, shutting out reality, are the inadequate philosophies and tawdry idealisms which shaped the thought of the last two centuries...

...Sharing a preference for simple speech, the two also have in common the ability to draw their parables naturally out of the severe landscapes of New England...

...You just must think quicker than they do," observes an old Yankee farmer of his cows—"Knowing he did," comments the poet wryly...

...This poetry affirms a healing sanity in the cycle of the seasons...

...A sea horse appears as "a symbol of inwardness...

...Thus what often appears at first glance to be merely a still-life of natural details is revealed as a home-truth, and sometimes an epiphany...

...Such is the cancerous industrialism of the dying city...

...Much of the tension in Howes' verse arises out of a struggle between instinct and ideas: She wants flesh to triumph over spiritual sublimation...

...As the dummy weathers into the surroundings, she ceases to scare rodents and birds: "The spring may find her still, and grow towards her...

...He kept the balance between life and death, the sun and moon, the water and the stone...

...Pride, however, must have its fall: But a nest is no place to arrest a song that in its very nature has no end...

...Man's own creations, incongruously placed against nature, strike Howes' sharp eye as a reminder of human alienation...

...We, too, still contain the animal: In old age, the human digestive system becomes "the inside worm," the mythical Ouroborus,'whose dark message is "I live, I/Consume myself,/I die...

...Unlike Davison, Howes is apt to use her landscapes as objective correlatives for human states of feeling...

...The second year the orioles found an elm to build in somewhere in the neighborhood...

...They might have been my nestlings...

...Barbara Howes finds New England a congenial poetic landscape, too, though she varies it often with a setting antipodal to her dour Vermont hills—the superabundance of tropical climates...

...Animals, in particular, bring our humanity sharply into focus...

...Davison's poems deal in ideas, and their "messages" are more obvious than one generally expects from a modern lyric...