Speaking Through Other Voices
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing SPEAKING THROUGH OTHER VOICES BY PHOEBE PETTNGELL Have you ever tried to look at a winter landscape through the eyes of the Flemish Renaissance painter, Breughel? Or imagined...
...certain moments of sublimity may transcend anguish, powerless as they are to alleviate it...
...In "Firstborn," a new mother accuses her husband, "You couldn't look...
...Again, as with Browning, Dubie's scenes may shift in the twinkling of an eye from loveliness to brutality and horror...
...I saw her pulsing crotch...
...I saw/Converted love, your son,/Drooling under glass, starving...
...This is certainly a tribute to the interest provoked by her mature work...
...Scenes are carefully staged for the reader: "Inside the parlor Ibsen writes of a summer garden...
...Birth, not death, is the hard loss...
...Death is a suitor performing miracles (those water-walking skeletons), while life menaces and defiles...
...Perhaps one should not be surprised, therefore, that he has continued to do what has worked so well for him in the past...
...They are soon captured and sent to Dachau, where during happier days they attended a summer artist's colony in a hunting lodge stained with the blood of deer, set in a meadow of flowers...
...my reader in a trembling voice/ Speaks to the sailor, asking, 'What's the matter, what'sthat/ Fire on the shore?'The sailor answers,/'It's Hell, of course!'" In these poems nobody escapes suffering...
...They were not my choices...
...Instead, Dubie offers impressionistic word-paintings of significant details...
...Remembers his studies/In medicine, picturing the sticky/Overlapping eyelids of drowned children...
...Before long one realizes that all his personae are stand-ins for the poet in the act of creation...
...Dubie observes in poem after poem that art has the monstrous ability to be struck by the beauty of forms even in the midst of the most ghastly events: "the cellist died, here, admiring the noxious/Blue crystals on the floors of the gas chamber: the way,/At first, they darken to indigo and like smoke/Climb over your ankles, reaching to your waist?You fall naked as into the field that is with a breeze turning/All its wildflowers, bladder-campion and myrtle, into/A melody of just three staves written for four voices:/Slaughter and music./Two of the old miracles...
...If his latest output does not strike me as any progression, it suffers no diminution either...
...Elsewhere: "The doctors/Drink stale wassail...
...Sometimes they were historical figures: the possessed prioress, Jeanne des Anges (of Devils ofLoudun fame), a pirate, a Roman living out the last days of the Empire...
...In these poems where Gliick used a different personality, she fell most under the influence of those gods of the late '60s, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell, whose long shadows quenched so many weaker talents...
...the lice rooted in that baby's hair...
...In her mature poems she becomes compassionate toward this lost soul, too, and thus more life-affirming...
...Reflecting the painters, musicians and writers he portrays, Dubie is horrified by violence, yet so fascinated that he can't avert his eyes...
...At the stage when most young writers are still struggling through apprentice works, he had already perfected the forms he is still employing...
...His artists are often broken by knowing and feeling too much...
...Shelley, another poet who stacked the deck in favor of extinction, also used the molting of snakes as a symbol of rebirth, but Gliick has gone him one better by choosing a particularly vicious kind of serpent...
...The basil flourished on/Neglect...
...True, its stasis is a bit disconcerting-but then Dubie has always been an unsettling poet...
...the storm howling through Vienna has been conjured out of the pain and frustration of Beethoven's late piano sonatas...
...A very select list of the protagonists includes Tsar Nicholas II, Virginia Woolf, Ovid, Paul Klee, and Kierkegaard...
...They frown over the dead Beethoven...
...The persona has allowed Gliick to continue to express her vision of a world that sometimes seems less hospitable than nonexistence...
...That harmonic resonance is the only definite claim Dubie is willing to make for art...
...Moreoften, she chose rejected women, children, or cripples, or else the parents or lovers who had cast them off...
...In her private mythology, the Fall begins not with man's first disobedience, but with the Nativity...
...Like Dubie, she began by often using the mouths of others to speak her poems...
...In this unpropitious setting I first discovered Dubie, and his idiosyncratic style quickly separated him from the crowd...
...The Tree House" is spoken by a small, spooky voice signaling those that dominate The House on the Marshland (1975) and Descending Figure {1980...
...His poems are almost old-fashioned in their use of narrative...
...Firstborn opens with an especially ugly family triptych seen on a train...
...Dubie is a contemporary Browning without the Victorian faith or optimism...
...Louise Gluck's Firstborn (Ecco, 53 pp., $5.95), initially published in 1968 when she was 24, has just been brought back into print...
...In this chilling picture of withdrawal, care is associated solely with destruction, and the adult desires to become a child again to recede into the magicof Nature...
...The conclusion of a poem on Rodin makes his worldview explicit...
...Gluck's poetry, then and now, probes the thin line between the desire to kick back against the rottenness of life, and the impulse to turn tail and retreat...
...Here all conventional expectations are reversed...
...That kind of female fury energizes the works of Sexton and Plath: The husband who refuses to share his wife with their infant ends up by cannibalizing both...
...I know...
...Just Mister with his barren Skull across the arm-rest while the kid Got his head between his mama's legs and slept...
...Aubade of the Singer and Saboteur, Marie Triste" tells of a group of feckless young musicians turned freedom fighters against the Nazis...
...Ibsen is composing his summer garden in his snow-covered house on the shores of the North Sea while waiting for the arctic night to break...
...That is not said negatively...
...Child's come...
...The child is concentrating on the pedals," and, coming to the end of the piece, he Raises the damper from the wire So that the final sound maybe prolonged After the child's finger has left the ivory key, After all of the lamb has left the bone it warmed...
...Readers of modern poetry journals become stupefied by innumerable verses that are technically accomplished and often studded with minuscule beauties, yet have a monochrome sameness that makes them indistinguishable to all except the most attentive eye...
...Besides, Firstborn demonstrates that Gliick was already discovering her instinct to detach emotions...
...And there were other signs That death wooed us, by water, wooed us By land: among the pines An uncurled cottonmouth that rolled on moss Reared in the polluted air...
...1 pay with my life...
...Past this window where/My mother's basil drowned/In salad, I can see our orchard, balsams/ Clenched around their birds...
...But it doesn't work for Gliick...
...In one of the newer poems, he portrays the poet as a boy practicing the piano while his mother prepares roast meat...
...Indeed, the poems included here from In the Dead of Night (197'5), The Illustrations (1977), The City of the Olesha Fruit (1979), and The Everlastings (1980) do not differ in manner or theme from his new ones...
...nor does the poet suggest that those who endure blindly and dumbly fare worse...
...Cottonmouth Country" forecasts the eerie visionary tone that has become characteristic of her later work (though its rhyme scheme and taut lines still owe much, perhaps too much, to Lowell): Fish bones walked the waves off Hatteras...
...This poet, not yet 40, found his voice a decade ago...
...How about wondering what the jester, Yorick, thought of Prince Hamlet...
...The distance from one's own hysteria that can make or break anger poems just isn't there...
...Dubie takes the minutiae that are stamped on our memories during heightened emotional experiences-a spider on the rim of a plate, the skeletal pattern of veins on a leaf, birdcalls-and charges them with the intensity of the event during which they were noticed...
...Outside/The same March storm that swept through Vienna an hour before/Has turned in its tracks like the black, caged panther/On exhibit in the Ester-hazys' candlelit ballroom...
...Such fanciful flights are among the matter of Norman Dubie's Selected and New Poems (Norton, 145 pp., $5.95), containing verse from four of his 11 previous collections plus a dozen examples of more recent work...
...He moves from the desk to the window...
...Or imagined yourself as Queen Elizabeth I watching a bearbaiting while waiting for news of the execution of your fallen favorite, the Earl of Essex...
...But these poems, unlike Browning monodramas, do not try to capture the robust flavor of character or ideas...
...One of Gliick's most persistent voices is that of a watcher repelled by what she observes of the world...
...Open my room, trees...
...We are eating well./Today my meatman turns his trained knife/On veal, your favorite...
...the historical speakers frequently discourse on subjects, rather in the manner of Browning's monologists...
...I also left a skin there...
...The overtones of his poems, however, continue sounding long after one reads them...
...Gliick' s spare, unemotional, faintly mystical voice has developed into a striking one among the generation of poets born in the 1940s...
Vol. 66 • November 1983 • No. 22
