Lives by the Poets

...Having devoted the first two-thirds of his book to his father's family, Merwin shifts the emphasis to his orphaned mother in the last third—especially to that period after her husband's death when the poet tried to break through the barriers and establish communication: "She had been so secret, and I have grown up in the habit of being so reticent with her, that it cannot be easy now to find what we want to say to each other...

...Although his father, a Presbyterian minister, was called to a church in New Jersey, "arriving within sight of Manhattan on the eve of the Great Depression," relatives remained in Pennsylvania and were visited frequently...

...The first is to describe our broken world as it is, and yet give that description some overriding meaning...

...Around one woman who took care of him and his sister, he says, "there was always a breath of winter—not cold exactly, but a muffled, hueless presence, a waiting vapor...

...She has told me things that 1 have not heard...

...Describing these repressed, inarticulate people, he uses the same pared-down diction that is characteristic of his verse: "My father told me one legend of my grandmother's...

...Puella is not youth as any real girl would see it...

...Unframed Originals is a poet's recollections—shards shored against the ruins, rather than an attempt to make the incomplete into a story as a novelist would probably have done...

...Titles such as "Deborah Burning a Doll Made of House-Wood," "Deborah and Deirdre as Drunk Bridesmaids Foot-Racing at Daybreak," or" Deborah in Ancient Lingerie, in Thin Oak Over Creek" suggest the heraldric tableaus that form the setting of each of these poems...

...My father did not hear questions he did not want to hear...

...She tutored the poet, and ultimately left him all her money, enough for him to buy a house in France...

...Tomatoes," the first piece in the book, recounts the child's only meeting with his grandfather on the day when his father and uncles persuaded the old man to commit himself to a home for the aged...

...it is, in Dickey's words, "male imagined"?like the portraits of a Lesbia or Julia by classical and neoclassical writers...

...There were people who existed in another room, which I could not be shown because I was too young...

...Her husband did not count...

...To me it seems interesting only as an isolated index of the fantasies and self-justifications of the unknown minds that produced it, accepted it and passed it on...

...In the meantime, I was convinced that I knew less about my family...

...Merwin came from the Pittsburgh area...

...Swan flower lower phoenix, Controlled, illusory fire is best For us...

...Some antecedent of hers supposedly had been eaten by wolves, in a hunting lodge in the woods, in a blizzard, somewhere out in Ohio (pronounced 'Ahya...

...Listen to the maiden's invocation as she summons her unknown beloved: With no power of waiting With no single ambition With a hamstring heat-healing Like a tall sprinting wonder With upbringing well-hidden With a ring from a pine-trunk Through the ice-dreams of sunstroke With half of my first child With invention unending Have someone be nearing The Latin title is well-chosen...

...She was an old-fashioned Methodist, a sect that "harkened back directly to the itinerant Wesleyan preachers who had whipped up the Fear of the Lord...

...He recalls his first night under its roof, "the good of lying there in the night air and the smells and night sounds of the causse...

...The paternal grandmother, the matriarch of the Merwins, made "' Be sure your sins will find you out' into a household motto...

...Eventually, Merwin and his sister moved with their parents to a church in Scranton...

...My elders did not talk to me about all this, but they referred to it among themselves...

...Despite the use of the first person, this speech is not really Deborah's...

...In these poems, though, his highly-charged language evokes the inner landscapes he is striving for...

...Puella (Doubleday, 48 pp., $10.95) fantasizes about the girlhood of the poet's young wife...

...The details were vague or missing—who it was, when it happened, just where...

...And as I think of how little we have been able to tell each other of our lives so far, I realize how little I know of her, and how hard it is for either of us to follow the same subject for long in talking to each other, and even to pay sustained attention to what the other is saying...

...The poet still remembers his father's "stiff, tight look," opposing the grandfather's expansive invitation to the eight-year-old to eat some ripe tomatoes, an offer quietly countermanded as soon as the old man's back was turned...

...It was a trait that he and the rest of the family were said to have inherited from my grandmother----Ascribing its origin to her...

...within the memory of the middle-aged...

...Merwin has never been able to discover much about him...

...Some of the relatives seemed anesthetized in their relations to others...

...Every decision of mine and of my parents had been leading towards that half ruined, half finished structure, its shadows, its darkness, its smells of must and wood and night, the clear sounds of those bells, the notes of those nightingales in that season...

...I have not believed it for a long time...

...Dickey has an unparalleled exuberance with words...

...Acting as a foil for his father's irascible family is Merwin's only maternal relative, "Margie," an eccentric and rather noble figure...

...It would belong to me in due course, and sooner if I behaved...

...The author does not conclude with this vision of the good life, however...

...This sad story of generations misunderstanding each other, of a lack of sympathy between father and son, carried over into the relationship between Merwin and his demanding father...

...In "Deborah as Scion: With Rose at Cemetery" she speaks words we would doubt were ever spoken, if taken literally...

...Pondering on the unknown areas of his parents' lives at the time of his mother's sudden death, Merwin comes in the end to an understanding of "unvoiced suffering itself," and gives it a voice in this moving work...

...Thesecond is to makecontact with the singer inside us who affirms our powers of "unending invention...

...Unframed Originals and Puella together illustrate two of the principle functions of the poet...

...than it was usual to know...

...It had soured...

...The fire of the earlier years had subsided—by comparison at least—to a scripture-quoting pietism, a pursing of lips and a willing suspicion, a straight and narrow Grundyism...

...Has any writer since Vachel Lindsey enjoyed the drumbeat of sound so much...

...Dickey devises a masque of Lyric Beasts in Puella, "enchanted with unnecessary being,/Emblem-eyed, degenerate with symbols...

...On the other hand, his Aunt Alma was too vivid: In her later years she would hysterically insist that the police or an ambulance be summoned, because of the grisly catastrophes she believed had overtaken some imaginary child...

...Be what I am not, and I am...

...justified it and permitted them to take pride in its incorrigibility: it was a family trait...

...This feeling of being left out gradually deepened into the realization that for the Merwins the past was forgotten, or rewritten to suit another purpose...

...instead, it expresses her poet-husband's love and awe at the beauty she has inherited from her Southern progenitors: "In steady-state insolence/I bring up a family/Look: a look like sword-grass, that will leaveon anything human/A swirl-cut, theunfurling touch of a world-wound/Given straight out/Of my forehead, and have all the work and tide-pull of the dead, from their oblong, thrilling frame-tension/Filled here with sunlight...

...Already I was displacing them...

...For Merwin, the past cannot be recaptured...

...his tenth book of poems, James Dickey has created an imaginary past to fill in the gaps of his knowledge...

...The fluttering of the unseen bats receded as they left through one of the empty window frames...

...Deborah is his Muse, the force of creativity itself: Young outriders of the absolute...

...He never embroiders or elaborates on the austere reminiscences here...

...in the immeasurable antiquity of the place, was something I had not even imagined...

...Rise and on faith Follow...

...Of late, Dickey's baroque style has been criticized for having over-ripened, become too deliberately artificial...

...It is better that I should be...

...Once I imagined, with no way of saying it, that my parents, and everyone of their age, kept somewhere among them the whole of the past," Merwin recalls wistfully...

...The craggy, obdurate scenery of anthracite country forms an appropriate backdrop for the bleak lives described in this book...

...Both approaches provide words to convey thoughts and feelings that would otherwise remain inexpressible...

...Merwin's description of that domicile is as lyric as his memories of Pennsylvania are subdued...

...But years ago it was thought to be a good story and was repeated occasionally...

...The heroine drifts through this exotic dreamscape, redolent of The Magic Flute or Wherethe Wild Things A re, trailing one elaborate costume after another...

...In that faith she had brought up her children...

...It remains fragmentary, tantalizing—a ragbag of odd scraps symbolized for the child by a smell, a mental picture, or a partly remembered conversation...

...He simply offers the bare bones of memory, together with "a few desiccated facts" about his family...