Outer and Inner Landscapes

...The irony that hovers between man's transience and the relative permanence of his surroundings forms the dramatic tension in these poems...

...Somewhere in between, poet and reader make contact...

...This meticulousness stems less from pedantry than from a conviction that the universe is composed of myriad data that add up to a whole, and he offers his statistics with a jaunty charm or with ruefulness...

...A.R...

...Youmissit, itmissesyou...

...Equally austere in his philosophical outlook, he avoids any trace of sentimentality and resists the temptation to betray a fact that does not fit a generalization...

...Beneath the clowning, it turns out, Ashbery too has a certain monkish detachment...

...Ammons demands that his poems be read with the same scrupulous attention he puts into writing them...

...And the poem/ has set me softly do wn beside you...

...Consider the off-hand observation that "The great plumes/Of the dynastic fly-whisk lurch daily/Above our heads, as far up as clouds...

...Then he suddenly turns on the reader...

...Play...

...Ashbery's reliance on ellipsis is not an attempt to play coy with his readers (at least, not most of the time...

...through him we observe the way all things " praise themselves seen/in my praising sight...

...In "Swells," Ammons enters "my mind" to watch the motion of waves with their "universal assimilation: the/ information, so packed, nearly silenced with majesty/and communicating hardly any action: go there and/rest from the ragged and rapid pulse, the immediate threat/shot up in a distintegrating spray, the many thoughts and/sights unmanageable, the deaths of so many, hungry or mad...

...Ammons does not stray from the most elemental feelings: a love for things as they are, sorrow at their decay, a bemused desire to comprehend as much of his surroundings as he can contain...

...If this confession seems overscrupulous (since he obviously loves nature more than most of us), it nonetheless springs from an unflinching honesty????An awareness that every shutting of our eyes to destruction represents an unhealthy idealization...

...As the title suggests, here he concentrates on landscapes, usually uninhabited ones that can provide a temporary escape from people...

...I scooped up the sand which flowed/away, all but a cone in the palm:/the mountain said, it/will do for another year...

...What begins as a magisterial evocation of nature ends with an irrepressible image of human suffering, and if the effect is "unmanageable" it is also unforgettable...

...The poet has been checking up on this year's new leaves, while noticing "sand or rocksoil already mixed/with meal or grist/ from last year's decayed ones...

...The actual sense of the action is elusive, as in opera, and one hardly cares, coming away with a comfortable feeling that the tone has somehow carried all the important meaning...

...the book is made up of 50 poems of 14 lines apiece (definitely not sonnets, un-rhymed or otherwise...

...the old song goes, and recognizing this is critical to understanding poetry...

...He seeks to capture "the truth inside that meaning" that prevents poetry's reduction to a paraphrase, and perhaps that is why his romantic affirmations about our passions are never flattened into mawkishness or half-truths...

...What he calls "one's private guignol" of horrors is only part of the interior theater we impose upon ourselves...

...Well, actually, but I consider play to be A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern...

...In the past, Ashbery's lyrical strengths were best exemplified by his long poems, but now he seems able to move just as freely in a briefer space...

...This familiar poetic stance, usually associated with expansive-ness, is rendered in a monkishly spare style (it has often been noted that Ammons denies himself the usual quota of modifiers, especially those connoting emotion...

...back a way they sift in a tearless place: but, I said, it's so quick, don't you think, quick: most time, the mountain said, lies in the thinnest layer: who could bear to hear it: The mountain, as befits something so ancient, takes the stoic position that in time no loss will seem very important, hence, why lament...

...We dutifully look, but the trick seems to have misfired...

...Nothing mutable is alien to Ammons...

...In finding language to depict "The weather of the soul," John Ashbery has few equals...

...In Ammons' generous love for the particulars of creation there really isa sanctification: Because he values this brook, that bush or mountain or bluejay, and takes the trouble to watch each one as closely as he can, we know that he is not posing or trying to mystify...

...He can be trusted...

...The poem is you...

...His work has an operatic air, entertaining us with a variety of cadenzas performed against pleasantly tacky backdrops...

...Nevertheless, for many readers they will always amount to more about penguins than one wanted to know...

...A Coast of Trees (Norton, 52 pp., $12.95), his 16th book, is suffused with a lyrical radiance...

...Much has been said about Ashbery's polite evasion of any attempt to synop-size " plot" in his poems and certainly there are many mysterious passages in his verse...

...Fortunately, Ammons has another manner and technique in his short poems...

...And in A Coast of Trees he rephrases his persistent question: "How are we to find holiness,/our engines of declaration put aside./helplessness our first offer and sacrifice...

...I think you exist only/ To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren't there/Or have adopted a different attitude...

...Ammons insists that for flesh and blood death still comes too soon, and we cannot help recoiling from the horror of it...

...Who, indeed...

...Meanwhile, the actual reader must make something for himself out of the poem's solipsism, so that he, too, recreates it as his own...

...Continuing," one of Ammons' many colloquial conversations with a mountain on the subject of mutability, typifies his perspective...

...A grave poet like Ammons makes each wrinkle on every leaf his own...

...Yet by allowing the mountain the last word (in deference to its persistent solidity) he neatly balances pathos and philosophy...

...A dreamed role-pattern," forexample, demonstrates Ashbery's facility at assuming multiple voices, personalities, or stances at will, then shrugging them off...

...Ashbery carries the old saw that "poetry is its own subject" to its limit...

...In his longer efforts, the reader must share Ammons' faith in the significance of the details he catalogues...

...His more consistent underlying view is that life is benign and "will be neither good nor bad when experienced...

...T JL, he baroque poetry of John Ashbery seemingly presents the greatest possible contrast to Ammons' pared-down diction...

...If you have to ask, you don't get it...

...Paradoxes and Oxymorons" claims to be "concerned with language on a very plain level./Look at [the poem] talking to you...

...Only a poet who has accepted such an ascetic range could get away with that loaded word, "holiness," without making us wince...

...How little I have really cared about nature, I always/thought the woods idyllic and let it go at that," he reproaches himself, following this admission with a medical report on the damaged trees in his woods...

...Like Hopkins' Margaret, he thinks of the blight man was born for: is this, I said to the mountain, what becomes of things: well, the mountain said, one mourns the dead but who can mourn those the dead mourned...

...His poetry enriches what he sees...

...Yes, it really does work like that...

...Despite its paradoxes (not to mention oxymorons), this seems relatively clear on reflection: Poems address an audience that the author has dreamed up as he works, so that both are, in a sense, his creation...

...Ashbery scratches his head, pretending to consider what went wrong, all the time keeping up his professional patter like a magician whose rabbit has gotten stuck in the hat: What's a plain level...

...Although such a bald summary sounds platitudinous, Ashbery makes his thesis both playful and profound in his poem...

...Each poem has its particular tone of voice?to fail to catch its inflections is to miss the boat, which explains why so many poets refuse to discuss the "meaning" of their works...

...At its best, though, his playfulness becomes a way of sidestepping banality, and puts solemn subjects in perspective by protecting them from overstatement...

...Sometimes Ashbery can be willfully frivolous in his unseriousness, especially in his annoying habit, picked up from Wallace Stevens, of silly titles: "Penny Parker's Mistake," "The Image of the Shark Confronts the Image of the Little Match Girl," "Corky's Car Keys...

...He can identify with everything changeable, feel diminished with each disappearance from his landscape, be reborn in every new growth...

...It is that and other things, Bringing a system of them into play...

...Shadow Train (Viking, 50 pp., $8.95) is a sustained experiment with a new short form...

...Ashbery absorbs the ebb and flow of the interior landscape and lets his poetic scenery dissolve into personification: "I said it from a dim upstairs porch into the veiled/Shapely masses of this country you are the geography of he addresses someone, or imagines that "the idea [of happiness] Warning, waiting there like a forest, not emptied, beckons...

...Itemized costs on the repair bill for his car, for instance, or the variations in temperature throughout one winter, show certain "configurations...

...Who can say/What it means, or whether it protects...