Coloring Emotions

...Similarly, Revell's poems keep playing variations on themes of personal loss, inner wounds, uprootedness The abandoned cities of his past "shine with exile, with pity" as he examines the memory of each for its pattern of ruined hopes Young women die of cancer, people are betrayed by their lovers, or by their own feelings Still, a decided toughness in Revell's imagination prevents him from allowing these poems to drown in their own despair They cannot quite maintain their depressive state...

...Each summer comes down to a failed poetry A few discretions, lives from an old book with pictures, continue to flare in the same room and fall short of the window In familiar starts, the wind and lamplight respond as the dark gets lively This liveliness is an encouraging sign, suggesting that Revell's emotional chords may become increasingly complex and varied In the meantime, From the Abandoned Cities succeeds on its own terms...

...But Revell has learned that" As always, the transient wins out / / over the native because it is always, / having been schooled by dispossession, stronger " And, he notes, "since the faith of these white stones grew out / of dispossession and its cruel, vague hope,/perhaps it's good that they should face the trailer/and the plaster Mexican with his mule cart/full of flowers Each can comfort each/with impermanence, with gospel 'This is not/ /our home ' ". Shakespeare's Orsino in Twelfth Night, loving his misery, asked to hear some music again because "it had a dying fall...

...For aftermath, the catatonic apartment In the roominghouse yard a scrap of snow m mud A bare arm hanging out of a window, or one Dirty big toe, cold at the mouth of a broken Shoe Budweiser cans, three grapefruit skulls under the Window of the girl painter Sandy's palette is daubed with emotional shades, and his unerring sense of color and detail fits perfectly with the climate of feeling evoked by a given stanza "Nativity" is spoken by a father who participated in the delivery of his first child He tells his wife of "The dazzled retina, then the Persian blue / sky I saw that shone above your head / Stars and planets gleamed, spun/in one/boreal candelabrum,/shone out tar from the saddle and the sheet / lighting a way, this exile from / ourselves, this passing through " The distorted reflection of the infant's emerging head in the mirror over the operating theater provides this fractured view-the sort of thing one is liable to experience in a state of euphoria or shock It terms an objective correlative to the parents' realization that this new person will be a separate being from now on...

...Gradually, a more disturbing recollection intrudes Just before embarking at the station, he had seen an old woman collapse from a fatal heart attack Gazing out at the uncompromising landscape he forgets pathetic fallacies about mouse behavior, and considers whether we are capable of facing the inevitable with the same readiness as animals "Maybe the lady chose/it this way, ready to shed / her frilly skin, to lie back, / savaged The willingness/of an animal to be dead/ when it must " The poem ends with the apparition of a red fox in the snow Its wildness embodies the inexorable shape of the peak...

...Readers fortunate enough to own the 64-crayon set specified may try out the colors to see what the poet has in mind The picture emerges as a shimmering spectrum blending the hues of sea, sky and beach Yet Sandy is not merely attempting a pastel word painting, the seductive list of names is the true subject of this poem...

...Revell is poignantly aware of how the most trivial event can occasion disproportionate sentiments One's spirits are inexplicably lifted by sunlight, a color, a certain landscape Conversely, those things that ought to inspire genuine passion often leave one slightly disoriented or detached Hence his eye is drawn to abstractions, or the unreal aspect of a scene "The view was all lines and ringed spaces," he says, as in some modern painting In "Central Park South," noticing the way the surrounding Manhattan buildings appear to curve over the park, he writes that "The light / is still what you remember having thought of/when you thought of Venice, Henry James, / or being happy-blue, with a touch of grey/ and orange " Of another borough, he says, "Through heavy air, you look out over the Bronx/and count the streets you can see Alone on a hot, / dark platform of the el you can see them swim " However surrealistic, all these phenomena are acutely scrutinized I only wish Revell would abandon his annoying habit of using the second person when he means the first Where a voice is as unaffected as Revell's this arch device jars...

...Many of these poems achieve their effects through sensuous particulars exactly observed April showers are compared to "blown Venetian glass/beads of rain" in whose reflection "the purple or golden para-/ chutes of crocus droop /The pinstripe lavenders/and saffron soaked through, / limp " Texture is palpable "A cat no one can sec is sleeping in the blue/Corduroy of weeds" in "Cyanotype " Elsewhere, "the trail stops here /Or so it merely tails in breaks where kudzu/Wild grape and raspberry lashes rope and knot " These still lifes can be as delicate as an impressionist landscape, or as bleak as a Hopper painting...

...The bright hills followed like talk and the ride was easy The dead springs, the Imperial Baths' blue against orange leaves went dark in the car's long shadow and then shone For miles, the towns were a cool light on the country road We left, a last town outrunning the dark by minutes as the night caught on The abandoned houses, the failed sky broken by hills in blue swirls thinned and were lost As in so many of Revell's poems, the bright major key abruptly modulates into a minor one of loss and futility It is no accident that several of these pieces are inspired by the music of Eric Satie, especially the melancholy gymnopedies...

...It is difficult to account for the neglect Sandy's work has suffered during the last decade, despite his earlier successes Whatever the reasons, his verse attests to his powers of survival and endurance Riding to Greylock marks the renaissance of a fascinating poet As Stephen Sandy observes, "After night, the tunnel of day '. Donald Revell was selected by C K Williams as the winner of this year's open competition for the National Poetry Series From the Abandoned Cities (Harper & Row, 73 pp, $9 95) is an appealing first collection Like Sandy, Revell is gifted with a vivid pictorial sense and a musical lyricism Where Sandy's visual preciseness conveys an immediacy of feeling, however, Revell distances himself from his impressions, rendering them as nostalgia-soaked memories "A Road and Clouds" begins...

...From the Abandoned Cities is about mutability Walking among "Graves in East Tennessee,' the poet asks, "Of all the places they could put / a trailer, why just there between the dead / and the view the dead had taken in exchange / for lives...

...A box of Binney & Smith Crayola crayons, carnation Pink, sea green, periwinkle, burnt sienna Half a maize, a stub of sky Blue They looked Ready to use again After a musing child had colored in a lichen Or dotted the nightshade with purple dots, The box of colors seemed to lie there ready To turn a pebble red or blue, to heighten a petal...

...Writers &Writing COLORING EMOTIONS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL appearing after a hiatus of 12 years, Riding to Greylock (Knopf, 115 pp, $11 95) is Stephen Sandy's third collection of poems It possesses the same strengths that distinguished his admirable Stresses in the Peaceable Kingdom (1967) and Roofs (1971) Sandy's pictorial eye complements an ear attuned to the nuances of sound and rhythm "At Peaks Island," one of several seascapes in this book, "someone had left/Beside a patch of lichen and a square of moss...

...Sandy's concern with subjective states fleshes out the ideas that form the sturdy backbones of these poems His thinking is no less durable than the "hard looking' that has at lorded him his best moments "End of the Picaro," for instance, takes its theme from the picaresque genie, novels whose action has no other structure than the escapades of a rogue The poet probes die i elation between the adventurer and his stay-at-home author Sooner or later, fictional alter-ego and godlike creator must meet and merge...

...Here your youth Stymied at the stricken plot of the world Stands at the edifice eternity Defaces and like an Asian god, with eyes Averted, effaces himself and doubles back And homeward, down tangled banks, to your first need "Riding to Greylock" uses the grim mountain, hulking "like a beached whale/ flooded by air" as a backdrop for the speaker's mental associations Caught in the tedium of a bus journey, he tries to read a boy's nature book-the kind that discusses the habits of animals in terms of human citizenship-while worrying about the keys he has lost m a snowdrift He cannot help wondering, "Are mice unreconciled as us to losing things in the snow...