Meditations on Stones and Cityscapes

...It not only hears the pot taking shape but perceives as well the animal excretions and corpses making up the dirt...

...The emerging vessel seems alive to Bell because its surfaces are composed of a host of beasts and people whose concealed presences (he knows through the elephant ear) endow it with body and spirit, while at the same time preserving themselves: These things that have the right substance to begin with, put into the fire at temperatures that melt glass, keep their fingerprints forever, it is said, like inky sponges that walk away in the deep water...

...Harvey Shapiro's cityscapes, for all their realistic detail, are as visionary as the Dead Sea on which the Ancient Mariner was becalmed...

...He also believes Freud's depressing aphorism that every fear is a repressed wish: "Waking unhappy and alone / at two am is the way / you wanted to be...

...What choice did he have other than to accept what happens, he asks...

...The sense of irony is tempered with compassion: There is a bag lady who has her station on 43rd Street near Sixth A venue in the middle of the sidewalk...

...I wake happy but I am happier yet...

...For my loves are like the leaves in summer...

...There is more to The Light Holds than the usual midlife-crisis book of dying parents, failing health, crumbling marriages, and depression—though all these ingredients have been thrown into the poet's melting pot...

...At the Shore," he wakes in the black hour before dawn, "to say once again that my / dreams are pernicious I and blur the clarity of what I see— I mute swans, cormorants, the rushes...

...In the past, Bell employed short, irregular lines and a choppy enjambment that gave his poetry a breathy, rather nervous quality...

...The New York Times and The New Yorker are on that street...

...Bell knows, of course, that such thoughts are escapes into fantasy...

...Drawn by stones, by earth, by things that have been in the fire...

...Bell likes to listen to the voices of things...

...To Bell this means coming to terms with the limitations of existence and love, form and tradition...

...Some of Shapiro's vignettes come close to being jokes...

...He justifies his poetic vision by saying, "But I was happy, and my happiness made others happy...

...He deeply feels the erosion of the intensity of his own primal experience...

...Naturally, it's only a tiny version of an ear, but it's the thing you want to pick up out of the toolbox when you wander into the deserted ceramics shop...

...Disasters have, in fact, befallen his favorite elm, willow, pine, and oak...

...These lines are from a poem appropriately titled "Bad News...

...Here is his explanation of the volume's title: I can tell you about this because I have held in my hand the little potter's sponge called an "elephant ear...

...I wake happy with her soft breath on my neck...

...It emerges when he hears his collection of favorite stones gossiping about his character, projected from their particular temperaments—adamantine, light and porous, or heavy...

...It still does...

...But as Wordsworth was the first to tell poets, only children naturally see the world this way...

...He takes seriously the poet's license to be civilization's last shaman...

...Mostly, they are New York overcast by interior weather, but he would like to see them become that Jerusalem where the light holds...

...No sound is dissonant which tells of life," he quotes from Coleridge's beautifully resigned "This Lime Tree Bower My Prison...

...The mutability of love is another orthodox Romantic concern of Bell's...

...That Romantic theme is one Bell keeps coming back to...

...Indeed, there is an impish, Peter Pan side to Bell...

...The poems of Drawn by Stones, by Earth, by Things that Have Been in the Fire have chosen what Wordsworth called "the abundant recompense" for primal loss—an increased sympathy for one's fellow humans...

...It points out "the crab imprint / that gives the galaxy a picture of the galaxy," and the pebble found under the shoe becomes a "star of daylight" that "helped me to cut my way home...

...But a note of sadness colors the rebirth, as he shows in recalling a flight over the corn fields of his home state, Iowa: How beautiful were these rediscovered rectangles beneath our wings, down there dumb to intention in the black truth of an indifferent earth...

...No one else really knows what goes on inside you, after all: "Thus, in my neighborhood, passion—even rapture!—I survived in secret, and still a child appears / in the guise of a grownup at dusk and story-time...

...Harvey Shapiro's natural landscape is a city skyline...

...Potters claim they can feel the embryonic shape implicit in a particular lump of clay, and that their craft consists of helping it assume a predestined form...

...once grown, the rare reoccurrence of such inspiration simply reminds us of what has been lost...

...Shapiro insists that "Grace of memory, / though the affect is dolorous, / knits up the mind...

...Who will care for such a thing...

...After the garbage truck/has stopped grinding the world," he acknowledges, "the rhetoric inside my head/catches up and begins to work...

...and in frequent recollections of his former state as a 20th-century child of Nature...

...His poems close, at their best, with the wise, aphoristic tone of Coleridge's work: When I was younger and had the gift of sight I did not understand that all that is asked is that we not mar the work of creation, doing injury to others and ourselves...

...To Be" slyly suggests that poets should circumvent adulthood...

...In "Trees as Standing for Something," he eloquently confronts a mixture of gladness and sorrow: More and more it seems I am happy with trees and the light touch of exhausted morning...

...11.95), radiates his characteristic exaltation in the presence of Nature...

...Youth," the book's opening poem, "Begins again in a kiss, in a passionate word, / begins where lazy fingers again feel suddenly / the surface of an ordinary thing—" after a long hiatus of apathy and disenchantment...

...She was there when I went to work, and there on my return...

...Even so, "Now you see a man at peace, happy and happier yet...

...So is the Century Club...

...when they fall, and I wake with a start, will I feel the sting of betrayal and ask, What is this love if it has to end, even in death, or if one might lose it even during a life...

...You can I put on the light...

...Trees spoke from the wooden sides of houses" to him, and " Out of the throat of the world, a pebble emerged," scuffed up by his shoe, making him exclaim," It's as if something in nature were asking my help, I but modestly, reluctantly...

...Mostly his mood is sorrowful because What is always there, out the window, is the failure I feel before America, my inability to make it rhyme with my interior weather, except under the stress of strong emotion— love or loss— Shapiro keeps alive the immigrant's pathos in the face of the gulf between "American success" and the dismal reality...

...Now, suddenly, the strongest poems move in flowing pentameter...

...Shapiro often makes himself the bearer of unpleasant home truths at once funny and painful...

...There's no one to disturb./ The taste in your mouth I is your dream: I infidelity, cowardice, fear...

...His kind of verse draws its strength from fresh appreciations, from the ability to see connections between seemingly unlike objects...

...But oh...

...Yet unlike Bell, he does not have a disposition that naturally rejoices in rocks and trees...

...His apartment "suggests the emptiness of Grant's tomb/figuring Grant got out/ and nobody got in...

...Expanding this idea, Bell says, "The elephant ear listens to the side of the vase/as it is pulled upwards from a dome of muddy clay...

...The tone has matured, taken on the serene resonance of such masters of free verse as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Whitman...

...It's a hard street to impress, I want to tell her, even with bags of different colors and scarves to examine slowly in the sun...

...Instead of trees or stones, he observes "a young woman on the IRT/ getting off at Borough Hall," studio apartments in the pallor of 3 a.m., the oxidizing statue of "Shakespeare in Central Park in Winter," cockroaches, garbage-scavenging sea gulls, and other fauna of the urban scene...

...His sixth book, The Light Holds (Wesleyan, 80 pp., $16.00), concentrates on "battle-gray Manhattan," his present home, and concludes with a "Jerusalem Notebook...

...Shapiro's observations, while meditative in the Romantic mode, are trying to develop a philosophy that will conquer "ego demons as far as mind reaches...

...Yet the book marks a significant change in technique...

...and of course you assume it must always have been this way...