Midlife Journeys
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
On Poetry MIDLIFE JOURNEYS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL "Iin mid-journey through life," wrote the Florentine poet, "I discovered myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost." Before Dante...
...The second, "Ogres," depicts by contrast a vengeful destroyer who eats his own sons until he is murdered and consumed by them...
...Like the greatest devotional poets, Feldman does not perceive art as an end in itself, but only as the highest expression of our confrontation with Divine Truth...
...It is unquestionably an apprentice work, written in an idiom Feldman obviously found uncongenial...
...Feld-man has always been a passionate and powerful devotional poet who lives by the affirmation that "there is no singing without God...
...The poet, accordingly, becomes a messenger...
...call me sabbath and ending . . . / call me distance-and I depart;/the universe-I disappear/and am immortal and forgot...
...Images of the poet's mother sewing lead to a vision of King David as a garment worker, and the poem resolves itself by coming to terms with a world whose darkness is broken by a few bright patches...
...The themes of Leaping Clear (1976) are no less dark for being leavened with humor...
...The 11 meditations on the subject attack the puzzle from a bewildering variety of angles...
...the woman of tangled cloverleaf overpasses from whose gor-dian knots it is impossible to find one's proper turning...
...Three Tales" examines (or makes up) a few myths about God...
...The wine's odd color might remind us that "reality is so Californian...
...Although the tone is more natural to him, the poet's valiant attempt to make sense of the Holocaust results in even more ponderous verse...
...The decline of the railroads mirrors the lovers' own physical disintegration: "the tunnel's mouth overgrown and the engine/Shriveled, the paired rails twisted...
...Feldman, like Jacob, wrestles with an angel whom he will not release without first winning a blessing...
...Night has risen up from the vacant sidewalks like dew/Seemingly wept up by darkened grass...
...The Train," for example, is an extended stream of musings on the conventional associations between journeys and life...
...Finally, the poet catches a glimpse of "the first Brooklyn of the senses, ardent and complete/as it was in the setting out of the sabbath...
...This is indeed a leap of faith for the writer, and adds a new brilliance to his verse...
...On the other hand, it may be bluing, "For External Use Only...
...The greatest marvel of the book, though, is the title poem, "Leaping Clear...
...One of the most urbane poets writing, his mercurial mind sparkles with the iridescence of an opal...
...Daylight interrupts dreaming, but Trailing off in the far distance, the train of Thought awaits their lying down in the Stations Of Sleep...
...This account of an Egyptian taxi-driver who returned a wealthy purse left in his cab and was fired for doing good deeds on company time, while his daughter died for lack of money to buy medicine, is a joke that depends on the dreadfulness of its subject...
...Blue Wine (Johns Hopkins, 71 pp., $8.95) is John Hollander's first volume since his selected poems appeared in 1978...
...In "Sabbath," the Lord's rest is his planned withdrawal from his own creations, so that they may be spared the effects of his power: "They name me sacrifice?their old man is snoring...
...Sages would surely use it as a springboard for opaque parables...
...Family History" treats the same subject as "Works and Days," except less grandiosly...
...On a less exalted level, however, it is true that poets become more philosophical upon reaching middle age...
...Saw Israel's shining tents Fold up like a doctor's bag...
...Travel, this time by bus, is again explored in "Just for the Ride," a poem somewhat in the manner of its dedicatee, John Ashbery...
...In the notes to his new book, he engagingly explains the genesis of his title poem thus: "I visited Saul Steinberg one afternoon and found that he had pasted some mock (or rather visionary) wine labels on bottles, which were then filled with a substance I could not identify...
...The first of these is another revelation of light and innocence, in which God playfully hides in Nature from his own people...
...Could it be a sacramental wine of forgotten origin...
...The poet, upon reaching his stop, does not know where he is...
...I would guess from the evidence of Blue Wine that John Hollander is now at the crossroads of his own midlife journey, picking out a new direction to follow...
...The poems that follow are seldom so full of fey humor...
...The man has a nightmare of dungeon terminals and impossibly high, unsteady trestles...
...We wake to poetry from a deeper dream, a purer meditation-expanse of light in water pressing unquenched on our eyes...
...No one before or since has been anywhere near as daring...
...Before Dante resumed his path, his imaginative excursion led him first to confront the past, present, future, and eternity as seen through the eyes of medieval cosmology...
...Nevertheless, he must devise some significance for either eventuality so that the ride may have meant something after all...
...Magic Papers (1970) marked a conversion for Feldman, a turning toward the more personal problem of writing religious verse in a secular age: But if J enter, vanished bones of the broken temple, lost people, and go into the sanctum of the scattered house, saying words like these, forgive-my profaneness is insufferable to me-and bless, make fertile my words, give them a radiant burden...
...we swam in seeing, our bodies saw...
...The mystic concept that the decline of the importance of God in the imaginations of men is God's own doing makes "Three Tales" one of the important religious poems of our time...
...But as often at the end of/Journeyings when the uncho-sen/Alternatives seem more vivid/Than the way taken," this trip, too, becomes obscure and ends somberly...
...He may be back at home or on the other side of town...
...In "Beethoven's Bust,"an elderly German widow- and a middle-aged poet discuss Romantic Art at a party as he tries in his own mind to relate the death of her husband in a Nazi death camp, and his own survival, to the mystery of evil...
...Written in the condensed language of the post-metaphysical school, a typical stanza reads, Learned the cost of life in cents, To measure every ring and rag...
...This poem is an attempt to make sense of what was apparently in them...
...True, God does not answer, yet the poet has audaciously dared to write as if the Lord's voice might reply at any minute-as if He might speak to His people through the inspired poet...
...they will count slowly the passing cars and Board one, a dark one, at last...
...Despite the paradox of trying to regain what is already lost beyond recall, Feldman manages to wrest some triumph from his plea...
...Melancholy plays a continuo throughout them...
...Irving Feldman's New and Selected Poems (Viking, 218 pp., $15.00) demonstrates just such a development...
...In the end, Hollander decides that his "Blue wine in bold bottles" is for the poet to "take home with him/in the clear cup of his own eye, to see what he will see...
...It describes a walk through Brooklyn (Feldman's childhood home) that moves from cloacal images of misery and urban decay to a vision of transcendent radiance where objects dissolve into sea and air...
...if we did not laugh, we would despair...
...All roads lead inexorably into darkness, and this is often expressed through Hollander's obsession with dreams and journeys...
...The rueful tone conveys Feldman's preoccupation with the Holocaust far more effectively than the histrionics of The Pripet Marshes...
...A mock epic makes it the "sea-bright wine" of Homer...
...Do not deny your blessing, speak to us...
...The poem does have flashes of brilliance, but like others in the book, it cannot sustain the weight of its subject...
...The train takes on sexual connotations: "They have/Uncoupled, the dreamers, after the throbbing/Train, long halted in the soft/Tunnel has backed out into daylight again...
...His first book, Works and Days (\9(>\), dealt with such overtly religious topics as "The Saint," "The Prophet" and "Flood...
...Feldman's latest poems move from strength to strength...
...Voices distracted me and I awoke and after the voices died remain wakeful at midnight near children, felling them stories, what the voices spoke...
...Only horror survives our raging irony and we survive by horror," he concludes after exploring the story of "The Golden Schlemiel...
...It begins as a lighthearted excursion through characteristic scenery whose symbolism is neatly indicated...
...In his next book, The Pripet Marshes (1965), his voice combines the expan-siveness of Whitman with the anguish of Hopkins...
...The themes are absence and loss...
...Two lovers dream of separate trips each took to the New York World's Fair of 1939-40 as children, and of the Fair's wishful slogan, "I have seen the future...
...The title poem expostulated on nothing less ambitious than the matter of Jewish culture in a hostile world...
Vol. 62 • November 1979 • No. 21
