Poets of Ritual
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing POETS OF RITUAL by phoebe pettingell As I write, our northern woods echo with the reports of rifles as men (and a few women) track through the fallen leaves in their annual...
...In "Ark," the Jewish bride who fears losing her identity is reassured by her groom, who builds a bridge for her between the images of the Scroll of the Law and Noah's animals who came in two by two...
...Nevertheless, the old geezer can still spot animal traces that escape uninitiated eyes, and so turns the tables on the would-be befriender of life in this dialogue: "Smart's a thing I learned to be...
...Ivini.a Pastan's poetry dissects the tension that divides womanly rituals of motherhood and housekeeping from the solitary rites of the poet...
...An old hunter, almost blind, is caught trespassing on a new farmer's land and accused: "Its bad enough you kill off all the game/but worse that you're a killer who can't see...
...By summer one sharpens the eye and trigger-finger on crop despoilers: blackbirds and crows, rabbits, squirrels, woodchucks and raccoons...
...Instructing his own son in shooting with pumpkins as the target, Lea listens to the excited child explain his "technique" and privately notes that, unlike the squash, "game can't be expected/ to wait on his magic method...
...Pastan's laments are wryly humorous...
...She remembers that "Standing before the ark/I thought of seas of matrimony,/of shipwreck./When he stepped on the glass,/to recall the ruined temple, they say/I whispered: Man's dominion/over Woman...
...The rite forms the central theme of Sydney Lea's second book of poems, The Floating Candles (Illinois, 104 pp., $10.00...
...I plan to keep the wildlife wild...
...My city knows vermin, animals loose in hallways, boils, sickness, hail...
...The spirit tinkles like a collar bell, between tears and triumph...
...One of Pastan's most fruitful topics is the ambivalent, though genuine pleasure of marriage...
...Many of Pastan's poems crystallize the conflict between social living and solipsism in a single image...
...The pedagogy applies to poetry equally well: the experienced eye, the identification with surrounding life, the drive to preserve oneself, the arduous mastery of craft...
...The only poem in this collection concerned with violence is against it...
...There is a subject outside the self that engages more than self...
...I saw the Walker gang./lugging a little buck...
...For Lea, true hunters are not bloodthirsty...
...In the suburban gardens seventeen-year locusts rise from their heavy beds in small explosions of sod...
...You just keep clearing back the brush, the vines?you won't have too much wildlife to be keeping...
...Sydney Lea knows how to bring down his quarry...
...Yet Pastan is not a Sylvia Plath, deliberately driving her work over the edge of fantasy into rebellious outrage...
...Thefemalespeakerof "Passover" triestouphold the prescribed rites to remind her husband and son of the flight from Egypt, but realizes that her child, a hippie, will soon flee everything his parents hold dear...
...The compact power of Linda Pastan's poetry is conveyed through a few unadorned ceremonial images and gestures, expressive of all that needs to be said...
...But passion happens like an accident./ I could let the dough spill over the rim of the bowl, neglecting to punch it down./neglecting the child who waits under the table/the mild tears already smudging her eyes...
...In traditional family dramas Pastan finds metaphors for broader horizons, lending her poems a political and social resonance...
...Last November/but hot by God...
...A sandwich size./ It would be...
...She knows what price men and women pay for domesticity, while realizing that not even poets want to live entirely alone, without responsibilities...
...Finally, the week or two of deer hunting provides the fortunate with gamy meat to flavor the austere winter...
...The lore is often obscure: "Without some superstition any bywoods is a puzzle/mystery," insists one of Lea's mentors, so hunters place their decoys in J shapes or circles, hunt only at certain hours and search the ground for mystic signs leading to the game...
...Despite his sanguinary theme, Lea is not one of those romantics obsessed with Lawrencian fantasies about male bloodlust...
...It is told as a barroom after-the-hunt anecdote: " T don't know your stories...
...Autumn heightens matters to a climax, beginning with bird season, when grouse drum through the brush, pheasants lie close to the ground and then start out suddenly in a flash of color from under one's feet, and ducks and geese wing south...
...Overrisen dough spoils the bread...
...They are disciplined teachers who train boys to survive, to sharpen their vision, to feel the landscape with its hidden inhabitants...
...There is menace implicit in the housewife's conclusion that "I have banked the fires of my body/into a small domestic flame for others/to warm their hands on for a while...
...Meditation by the Stove," for example, conveys the slightly overheated closeness of a room through its homemaker's monologue: /have banked the fires of my body into a small but steady blaze, here in the kitchen where the dough has a life of its own, breathing under its damp cloth like a sleeping child...
...And smart means chasing down a thing worth eating...
...Lea vividly evokes each time of year's occupations...
...The Feud" is a long narrative about the grim consequences of giving in to vengeful impulses...
...Lea captures how they see the landscape differently than others do, their blood brotherhood Up the hill a hundred yards a stump takes on the look of a Nimrod, tired but flush...
...demanding, often ungrateful children nevertheless need their mother and would be injured by her absence...
...And is still...
...Pastan is always alert for desires that make us want to break out of the regular pattern of our lives...
...In winter, bird hunters carve their lures and duckcalls...
...The theme can be treacherous, veering between the Scylla of A Room of One's Own-style feminist sloganeering and the Charybdis of Erma Bombeck's flaky housewife stereotype...
...This one here/is the meanest one I've got or ever hope to./Less than a year ago...
...time and practice will do that...
...where the real child plays under the table, pretending the tablecloth is a tent, practicing departures...
...He smiled and shook his head/and later held a shard of glass/up to the light...
...As a result, she examines both sides with delicacy and sympathy PM/AM: New And Selected Poems (Norton, 112 pp., $12.95) contains the heart of her four previous volumes, together with 19 new works...
...That bunch doesn't have the patience./I'd passed up two no smaller, and in the end/the family had no venison that fall.*" Lea's ear for speech makes his poems about people believable and grants his characters the same authenticity as Frost's flinty New England types...
...Hunters must learn forbearance above all...
...Writers & Writing POETS OF RITUAL by phoebe pettingell As I write, our northern woods echo with the reports of rifles as men (and a few women) track through the fallen leaves in their annual reenactment of that ancient ritual, the hunt...
...And free...
...Darkness of newsprint...
...My son, my son...
...With the thaw dogs are bred as companions for woods and field, not as house pets...
...In the New England communities he describes (New Hampshire and Vermont), mastering the subtleties of this primitive art continues to mark a boy' s transition from childhood into adult society...
...Flesh of my flesh...
...Describing the "first feast" of the season's gamebirds slain by his accumulated knowledge and skill, Lea observes: It is this blood that turns on the tongue to words, and the land rises again in mind like a planet, its contours of fear lust sin and love, that mixed topography of the heart, dark meat composed of earth and air...
...The men who engage in these pursuits recognize the symbols of their fraternity...
...These meditative yet lyric poems transport the reader into another perspective...
...Nevertheless, the poet does not correct...
...One admires these lines not so much for their surprise as for the spare carefulness with which they set the mood????boredom and frustration at the routine task of trying to mold beings who have stubborn wills of their own...
...A self-righteous gesture by the hero of "The Feud" ignites a powder-trail of malicious reprisals, escalating into uncivilized and brutal revenge...
...you'd better learn when you 're brought short of cash...
...I fill this outline in, with the crucial compound history of hunters-laughter, love, and melancholy once embodied in our lives together...
...The feeding haunts of fowl must be discovered, their silhouettes in flight committed to memory...
...In it/we saw condensed a perfect rainbow/and the white flash/of the dove's return...
...But Pastan's material chose her when she interrupted her writing career to raise a family...
...She imagines the plagues he will not escape: Far from Egypt, I have sighted blood, have heard the throaty mating of frogs...
...It is the poet acknowledging that the savage in us can take over at any time...
...Welt, nevermind...
...One wonders who will desert whom first...
Vol. 65 • December 1982 • No. 24
