Intellectual Delights

...On Poetry INTELLECTUAL DELIGHTS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL John Hollander's Powers of Thirteen (Atheneum, 103 pp , $13 95) is a sequence of 169 poems (13 x 13) of 13 lines each, followed by five pages of notes These sonnets manque are linked by their exploration of triskaidekaphobia, a hardly moribund superstition We avoid seating 13 at stable, frequently omit the number in designating the floors of tall buildings, joke nervously about Friday the 13th Since ancient times, though, there have been more favorable associations an extra month in the lunar calendar, a Jewish boy's coming of age (commemorated with the Bar Mitzvah), Christ with his apostles Thirteen, the poet reminds us, was also the lucky number of the original States in our Umon?and it is the sum of letters in his own name Unconscious and supernatural material has often haunted Hollander's poetry The Night Mirror (1971) evokes a child's fear of the dark The Head of the Bed (1974) and Spectral Emanations (1978) both conjure phantasmagoria from the kabbala interwoven with private nightmares Although Powers of Thirteen borrows from similar sources of inspiration, the effect is not so gothic These 13-hners are delicately wrought miniatures, retaining the compact beauty of sonnets without some of their monotonous strictures The poems' very neatness allows them to encompass chaotic emotions and avoid being swamped Hollander in this book addresses a beloved who seems to be at once a real woman and the Muse If matters are sometimes at sixes and sevens (another 13) between this couple, there are still many/delightful celebrations of "amenable locations" where "love and thought take their evening walks" to watch "dancing nymphs of trope," as well as more realistic scenes of Maine landscapes or Connecticut rambles Even in the pastoral settings, the suspicion always lurks that one "had been reclining .On dangerous ground, in the foul shadow of thirteen " Now and again, a malign force "rips the leaves/Out of the volume of our lives when the day's reading/In the chilled park is over " But by and large this serene work basks in a crepuscular contentment quite different in mood from the phosphorescent horrors of Hollander's former vision of the city of Dreadful Night A cycle of this kind naturally challenges the shades of classicism Hollander's initial boast, "I shall say 'what was never said before'" is a tall order, considering the rivals he has taken on "There they walked together with their friends/Laurie, Stella, Ceha, Delia, Bea and the others " Change Laurie and Bea to Laura and Beatrice, and you have the heroines of famous sonnets by Petrarch, Sir Phihp Sydney, Ben Jonson, Samuel Daniel, and Dante A "Preposterous graybeard with a touch of the farouche" strides through the countryside, too, "he trod the ground/Which now we stand on looking at him with far less ease ' This wanderer is Walt Whitman, father of the discursive verse no modern poet can afford to ignore, however much he may suspect that the trail has become worn In spite of these daunting precursors, Hollander continues confidently to his Muse, you will be walking A t my other hand, pointing out how immediate Presences—the gray, unquestionable rock I see, The untranslatable, loud wind I hear—yield themselves To the scentedness, warm of blood, full of heart, of the Living thing midway between them Moving up the path With you is as if mounting some trim companionway From the ingenious turbines up to the high points Of lookout, not rejecting where we had been before But bearing a part of what was into what will be The assurance with which Hollander greets the company of immortals he has assembled is not misplaced He never looks dim in their luminescent presence Many of the delights of this pleasure garden are intellectual The poet effortlessly toys with rhyme and meter, forms hidden acrostics, or writes an occasional classic sonnet These jests are the work of what the poet characterizes to his Muse as "Your bright younger sister, whom so many fancy to/be you"—Coleridge's Fancy, a madcap, willful sibling to the more serious Imagination In truth, Hollander is more devoted to the older girl The emotions and vistas m Powers of Thirteen carry the poems, not the pyrotechnics "Questions and answers, puzzle-games, prayers, quarrels and songs?of 'doubt, desire or emotion,' the old standards of loveShould at night, of themselves, come to stand in quiet lines/Like these, to be recounted, embraced and led to bed " The eene 13s ultimately seem to memorialize some private anniversary or lucky charm Yet Hollander's deeply felt meditations are magically transformed as "dust blown smilingly from heavy folios,/Joining the stellar whirl of possible golden motes " It is not often that a middle-aged poet, previously unpublished, appears on the scene with mature work of startling originality Nonetheless, that is the case with Amy Clampitt The Kingfisher (Knopf, 149 pp ,$11 95), her first book, seems as unusual as the nativity of Minerva, springing full-grown from Jupiter's brain Listen to the passionate timbre of Clampitt's voice in the arresting final stanza of her title poem Its heroine has been recalling "an episodic love affair" started in England during a "year the nightingales were said to be so loud/they drowned out slumber," and resumed in New York "Among the Bronx Zoo's exiled jungle fowl" and the thrushes of Wall Street Remembering the aftermath, "years of muted recrimination (then dead silence)," all these birds now strike her as emblematic of wasted gestures and the grief of renunciation a kingfisher's burnished plumage, the color of felicity afire, came glancing like an arrow through landscapes of untended memory ardor illuminating with its terrifying currency now no mere glimpse, no porthole vista but, down on down, the uninhabitable sorrow Clampitt's verse is densely layered, a stratigraphic record containing fossils from many different eons and terrains that the reader must uncover to reveal the whole structure Like Hollander, she provides notes, and hers amount to a bibliography of fairy tale, science, literature, Freud, nature field guides, and state historical pamphlets The texturing provides the following thumbnail sketch of Clampitt's birthplace, Iowa "Fishes swam here through the Eocene/too many tathoms up/to think of without suffocation Lightyears/of ooze foreshortened into limestone/swarm with starfish/remoter than the antiquated/pinpoints of astronomy/beneath the stagecoach laboring,/when the thaws came, through mud/up to the hubs Midsummer's welkng blue-stream/rose so high the wagons, prairie schooners/under unmasted coifs of canvas,/dragged belly-deep in grass/ across the sloughs /No roads,/no landmarks to tell you where you are,/or who, or whether you will ever find a place/to feel at home in ' This flowing transition from prehistory to pioneer crossroads (settlers moving West were often forced to winter m Iowa) leads into Clampitt's own sense of being a stranger and sojourner She is better than Grant Wood at capturing the atmosphere of Midwestern flatlands These are poems of ideas lit from within by emotions "Or Consider Prometheus" recalls that for over a century our economy rehed heavily on whale oil, then speculates on the great intelligence of these mammals who evolved back into water dwellers instead of dominating the land as they might have To Clampitt, their peaceful society, with its system of sonar soundings more complex than ours, renders them creatures akin to Swift's Houyhnhnms Our primate aggressions and greed for excess make her wonder how the whales might have differed from us had they opted to remain in our niche How, astronomers of the invisible, would they have tracked the roaring nimbus of the thieving appetite, our hunger for the sun, or charted the harrowing of jet and piston pterodactyls, robots fed on their successor, fire-drinking vampires of hydrocarbon ' Here the classical tragedy of Promethean ambition is re-embodied in a myth of evolution that satirizes our civilization Many of Clampitt's poems are so involved that they sound like distilled novels I think her scenarios can be deduced from the poems without undue difficulty Clampitt apparently worries, though, that her intricacies might get lost in a tangle of images As she observes in another of her Iowa poems "But it has no form'" they'd say to the scribbler whose floundering fragments kept getting out of hand—and who, either fed up with or starved out of her native sloughs, would, stowed aboard the usual nomadic moving van, trundle her dismantled sensibility elsewhere In fact, piece by piece, her associations thread together to create a powerful backbone for the sinuous verses in The kingfisher For Amy Clampitt, art consists in "somehow reconstituting the blister shirt of the intolerable" experiences of our lives into a bewitching mosaic One eagerly awaits her further revelations...