Poetry as Criticism

...The ode is pastoral, and what subject could be more bucolic than a raccoon robbing an orchard...

...Despite its unpleasantness, "The Scrivener's Rose" is no acid parable about human nature in the manner of Robinson Jeffers...

...In the Stopping Train and Other Poems (Oxford, 55 pp., $7.95) displays Davie's concern with form, word-play, and the battle between intelligence and feeling...

...He never needed to see,/not with his art to help him./He never needed to use his/nose, except for language...

...Otherwise, the reader will miss the fine insights that create much of the pleasure to be found in his poems...

...As a poet, he deplores this state of affairs...

...When Dubie uses his approach to penetrate the mind of another artist, his poems succeed admirably...

...An Englishman living in the United States, Davie addresses the first of his "sermons" on "Depravity" to Americans celebrating their bicentennial: The best, who could, went back-because they nursed A need to find depravity less dispersed, Less, as it seemed, diluted by crass hope...

...Then he redefines the last as "turn again," since for him there are no conclusive endings...

...As is often true with critical writing, enjoyment of Dubie's work demands some prior knowledge of his subjects...

...Yet even without that knowledge, Dubie's quirky verses offer a fascinating glimpse into the mind of the artist-And at their most Grand Guignol, they exercise a certain morbid fascination...

...This silly extravaganza of pseudo-Egyptian rites and necrophilia recalls those bad historical novels where a brilliant veneer of ancient costumes and customs serves as an excuse for sadistic prurience...

...When a hunting dog disposes of the hapless coon, though, Dubie subverts the classical decorum, destroying its perfections...

...We can "think" of the dead, but, unable to conceive of what they may be doing, we cannot "imagine" them...

...The "Depravity" of the title refers, in the end, to modern man's conception of words and experiences as distinct orders...

...One of the girls is mangled in a heavy press that embosses a rose onto stationery...

...The Harrow" approaches the same problem from a different angle...

...His poems seek to batter down the linguistic walls built up against experience, to give us back a language that relates what we observe to how we feel...

...Having used words to pick his emotions to tatters, this man can no longer feel anything beyond impotent rage that his speech and his experience have moved so far apart as to have lost all meaning...

...Is this why his art feeds parasitically on the art of others...

...The poem is less concerned with ugliness and brutality, however, than with affirming the diverse beauties of this world, the boundless variety of human activity...

...A recital of the tragic careers of some cousins of Herman Melville (real people, or imaginary?-it is hard to be sure with Dubie), the poem consists of a series of vignettes-many haunting, some horrible...

...Writers & Writing POETRY AS CRITICISM BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL In The Everlastings (Doubleday, 78 pp., $6.95), the prolific Norman Dubie continues to meditate on the meaning of history and the art of poetry...

...children are playing/Knuckles in the square" and two boys Straddle a sooty stack of a chimney, they are Topsy-turvy, winnowing feathers in a strong wind That jumps the Protestant martyrs dangling From gallows, the web of cloudwheels, or The rotten crossed-poles of a country crucifix...

...This is also where the story divides in my mind...

...The poem then moves on to a portrait of the artist, actually a self-portrait because he speaks in the first person...

...The Scrivener's Roses" demonstrates this broken perspective to advantage...

...The worst poem in The Everlastings, "There Is a Dream Dreaming Us," degenerates into self-parody...

...And there was a greater acceptance of mirrors and rhyme...

...Beneath a surface that scintillates with lyricism and lurid violence, Dubie's verse has a backbone of critical intelligence...

...Meanwhile, in a Georgian monastery recently destroyed by Sherman's artillery, Northern troops dance with the corpses of nuns, giving the Negro children who are spying on them their first notion of freedom...

...Here is an image that communicates easily, whether or not we share the Christian belief that prompts it...

...What can I tell you...

...As the poem develops, "harrowing" is brought out of its weakest, most conventional meaning of "distressing," through its primary metaphorical usage?lacerating"-to a triumphant resurrection of its literalness as Christ, the Word-made-Flesh, descends "Not into Hell but/Into the field of the dead/Where He roughs them up like a tractor/Dragging its tray of links...

...the labor of these nuns, we discover, had figured in another optimistic letter about the South from one of the sisters...

...At other times he is borne down by his own imagery into a morass of perversity and gore...

...It is somewhat disturbing that, since he hit his stride with The Illustrations (1977), Dubie has resorted to the same devices over and over and shown no appreciable development...

...Wells was 'Life,' and he was 'Art.' " But he does not mean to suggest that art is ultimately divorced from life...

...The poetry of Norman Dubie and Donald Davie requires that we employ certain critical faculties...

...On the contrary, James' artistic pursuit led him to "live on the scent always of that faint, pervasive/ Smell that alone explains what we've become," the emotionally bankrupt heirs of a decadent civilization...

...As a critic, Davie recognizes that, in our fallen intellectual state, we use language mostly to talk about emotion, rather than to express it...

...Like Dubie's, his poems often concern themselves with critical judgments, albeit in a very different fashion...

...Dubie's Breughel not only suffers internal bleeding from ulcers (possibly explaining all those images of food skewered with knives in the Cockaigne painting), his imagination also bleeds for the atrocities committed against the Flemish by King Philip's Spanish Army...

...not by the Press Nor the theatrical Pulpit...

...This is When the stream seems empty, silent...

...Davie reserves his longest, most complex examination of the language/experience dichotomy for the collection's title poem...

...Another artist to whom Dubie feels akin is Pieter Breughel, whose paintings succeed in reconciling the grotesque and the everyday...

...Dubie offers a kind of apologia for his method in "Ode to the Spectral Thief, Alpha...

...D onald Davie is probably better known for his criticism than for his poetry, but he is a fecund writer of both...

...At first he sticks to the usual pattern of the English Pindaric ode, with its three formal elements: turn, counter-turn and stand...

...With Popian wit, Davie encapsulates James' emigre career in a neat couplet: "Each year that he survived, things fell apart/Till H.G...

...But whereas Dubie illuminates the artist's mind with his art, Davie exercises his critical intelligence to flay his senses into a new responsiveness...

...Dubie's vision is Heraclitean: Time is always in a state of flux, weaving back upon itself...

...Localized, The universal could not be realized In words and not in words...

...The Land of Cockaigne: 1568" opens with some Breughelesque word-sketching: In a Dutch village, "amber like the light of the gospels," a "fat goose/Is being shivered under the knife...

...The choice of the classical song form most expressive of nobility or the sublime enables the poet to bring his own technique into high relief...

...Only that in past centuries There were fewer Dimensions to any concept of lime...

...Rather, it is a kind of imaginative literary criticism-An analysis of Melville's preoccupation with evil and fate, a force that drove him to create such repulsive images as the Maldive shark, "pale ravener of horrible meat...

...Melville finds and burns the missive at the Dead-Letter Office where he works...

...In this work, the poet imagines a Hell of the Sartrian No Exit variety, where a writer who knows the name of every flower, but cannot recognize a jonquil, is condemned to observe nature from the windows of a stopping train and is unable to put a name to anything he sees...

...He paints bold historical portraits, seeking to represent through them subtle and complex ideas...

...The hound bites into fur, meat and then Deep into the spilled milk of the spine...

...He seldom sticks to historical chronology in his portraits, preferring instead to intertwine his images in such a way that characters' beginnings are sometimes forecast by their ends, and the present is illuminated by the future...

...Her sister uses a sheet to write to her sailor brothers, assuring them that there will be no Civil War, although unbeknownst to her they have already been killed in a naval engagement...

...Is there some fundamental inhibition of his own imaginative powers...

...Exploring our feeling (or lack of it) for those "Unimaginable beings?Our own dear friends, the dead," Davie wonders, "Is it our loss of them that harrows?/Or is it rather/Our loss of images for them...

...I love pandemonium," cries one of his characters, speaking, alas, for too many of them...

...So back went Henry James to evil Europe, Unjust, unequal, cruel...