Spirits of Place

...Rain beat against the tarpaulins of their porches, Where, Sunday mornings, the bored children sprawl, Reading comics before their parents rise...

...The most remarkable aspect of Justice's verse is not what is said...

...A recurring vision of women turning into trees works only fitfully...

...These expatriate disciples of Joyce, Pound and Eliot claimed literature as their native land, and poetry as their local dialect...

...Donald Justice does not strive for original truths, or for new ways of depicting old ones...

...An elegy for Robert Lowell, that modern master of the violent image, is sentimental and weak—a common affliction of poets praising one another...

...Instead, Justice is a miniaturist, with an eye for the right detail...

...Similarly, "Childhood," while made up of kaleidoscopic impressions of the Miami of Justice's boyhood, owes a debt to "the poets of a mythical childhood—Wordsworth, Rimbaud, Hart, Crane, and Alberti...

...How shall I speak of doom, and ours in special./But as of something altogether common...

...Now, with another swing of the pendulum, an attachment to "roots" is again at a premium...

...The acceptingness of the washbowls, in which we absolve ourselves...

...Later, he evidently suffered misgivings as to the seriousness of this mode: How fashionably sad those early poems are...

...Expect aurora borealis in the long foray but no cascade of light...

...What do we say any more to conjure the salt of our earth...

...These tours deforce predominated in his first book, The Summer Anniversaries (1966...

...The two arch-traitors, locked in an eternal embrace of hatred, are a ghastly metaphor for endless brutality...

...He is still haunted by violence, "memory incubating blood...

...Justice, however, manages to be brief and neo-classical about a depressing men's room in the Omaha bus terminal: O the saintly forebearance of these mirrors...

...His characters inhabit a Checkhovi-an world where the personal tragedies of children and young women are as poignant as those of great men, even if they end not with a bang, but a whimper...

...The first four drew their themes from his origins and life in Northern Ireland...

...But this poet is not a tourist...

...North," a meditation on the ancient Celtic marauders, climaxed in an oracle from their "longship's swimming tongue" to Compose in darkness...

...It leads him to the revelation that "These things are not secrets but mysteries...

...The denial, though, only emphasizes the inevitability of fate...

...So much comes and is gone that should be crystal and kept...

...A JL JLnother Williams dictum, that "The classic is the local fully realized, words marked by a place," is born out by Donald Justice, whose elegant and polished work is too little known...

...No house of Atreus ours, too humble surely, /The family tree a simple chinaberry/Such as springs up in Georgia in a season...

...It embodies as well the paradox of the Irish poet, who has breathed new life into the language of his conqueror without, alas, bringing the two cultures closer to an understanding...

...Selected Poems (Atheneum, 137 pp., $10.95), chosen from his three previous volumes together with some new pieces, ought to remedy this neglect...

...In 1972, Heaney and his family left their violent homeland to settle in Eire—first in rural Glanmore, later in Dublin...

...He is most universal when writing about his own locale...

...Though he tentatively asserts that "The end of art is peace," he feels the gains must be carefully weighed against the losses in this newfound home...

...In one facetious verse, backbiting poets are cast into hell and condemned forever, "Jockeying for position, hasped and mounted/Like Ugoli-no and Archbishop Roger...

...Field Work (Farrar Straus Giroux, 65 pp., $8.95) is Sea-mus Heaney's fifth book of poetry...

...He lacks the daring of a Seamus Heaney...

...The "bog people,"—sacrificed corpses from the bronze age recently discovered in the peaty Irish loam—became for him the metaphor of murdered Ireland resurrected ("The Grauballe Man...

...Would any reader guess, without Justice's confession, that the second is an "imitation" of a Wang Wei poem, while the third is adapted from Baudelaire...

...mostly it seems too Arcadian for Heaney's earthiness...

...A poem about a specific place was often merely a tourist's snapshot, or perhaps a faded daguerreotype from a past the writer had otherwise put behind him...

...You know these small towns, how all traffic stops/At ten," he confides to us, and he does know them, intimately...

...That is self-pity induced by reading Lowell's "Skunk Hour...

...And his little windows expose the commonplace to the sunlight of civilizing art...

...Bucolics, however, are only a part of Heaney's understanding, albeit a substantial one...

...The rhymes, the meters, how they paralyze...

...Memories of the Depression" consists of three vignettes of the poet's childhood, all deceptively personal...

...One has to learn what the meaning of the local is for universal purposes...

...Heaney mourns the Irish tragedy and, in a manner that would please Williams, makes it seem universal...

...Working the earth gives Heaney a feel for "Words entering almost the sense of touch/Ferreting themselves out of their dark hutch...

...I think not, yet comparison with the originals reveals them to be brilliantly clever transformations...

...The good doctor's words were ignored by a generation of writers who took exile as their vocation...

...A poem with the unpromising tide, "Unflushed Urinals," might be for, say, Allen Ginsberg an opportunity to rail at length against the stench and waste of our civilization...

...In the remarkable North (1976), he transformed prehistoric artifacts of his country into moving symbols of its bloody present...

...The "hedge school of Glanmore," what the poet learns from the soil, is depicted in elegant Shakespearean sonnets (who but an Irishman would choose this more "English" form over the more familiar, and easier Petrarchan...

...Heaney makes the most of its ugly moral...

...it is the graceful and civilized way of saying it...

...On their clipped lawns and hedges the snows fall...

...After admiring a teenage girl, he tells us that he "felt like some old pike all bandaged with sores/Wanting to swim in touch with soft-mouthed life," yet since he still sounds very young, he fails to convince...

...This last is the complex and moving portrait of a World War I casualty who, in Heaney's own gloss, "was friendly with some of the leaders of the 1916 Rising yet, like thousands of other Irishmen of the time, felt himself constrained to enlist in the British Army to defend 'the rights of small nations.'" This "haunted Catholic face" in "Tommy's uniform" personifies the predicament of Ireland, wherein "all the strains /Criss-cross in useless equilibrium...

...he asks, contemplating an imaginary family portrait...

...There are many wonderful poems in Field Work—the sonnets, "The Strand at Lough Beg," "Casualty," "The Badgers,"—and one great one: "In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge...

...Justice's typical scene is a faintly seedy town, usually Southern, where the routine actions of the inhabitants nevertheless call to mind classical themes...

...Throughout North, Heaney hunted and often captured these flickering, dramatic illuminations...

...Field Work concerns itself with this transplanting...

...The book concludes with a translation of the passage from Dante referred to here...

...Critics denigrated those who celebrated their familiar landscapes as "regional poets...

...He appreciates "the grain of things./their tang of season and store," whether in the North or in Glanmore...

...Justice, a lyric poet, is a master of such intricate forms as the sestina and villanelle, where repeated words and phrases undergo iridescent shifts of meaning...

...The new poems are pervaded by an anxiety that the poet may not be able to, perhaps even should not put turbulence behind him...

...But when Heaney loses touch with his subject, he loses his sureness of tone too...

...Indeed, the quite different voice of Lowell occasionally corrupts Heaney's own clear tones—an interesting example being the misplaced reference to Captain Ahab's Pequod that has somehow strayed out of "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket" to founder on Irish shoals...

...The local is the only thing that is universal...

...His simplicity is a triumph of art...

...rom the shape of men's lives imparted by the place where they have experience, good writing springs," declared William Carlos Williams in 1929...

...How perilous is it to choose/not to love the life we're shown...

...he wonders...

...The poem evokes in part the half-finished town before its boom as a tourist mecca, in part the exotic "in-croyables Florides" of French Romanticism, but they are so perfectly fused no seams show: And sometimes, Where the city halts, the cracked sidewalks Lead to a coral archway still spanning The entrance to some wilderness of palmetto— Forlorn suburbs, but with golden names...