Through Memory and Miniatures

...Wright has produced an admirable translation of Italian Nobel laureate Eugenio Montale's The Storm and Other Things, and, indeed, Montale's voice is evident in the poems here set in Italy...

...Writers & Writing THROUGH MEMORY AND MINIATURES BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL The title poem of Charles Wright's latest collection, The Other Side of the River (Random House, 74 pp., $11.95), flows easily from memories of hunting along the banks of the Savannah where it divides South Carolina and Georgia to other Southern boyhood recollections: It's linkage I'm talking about, and harmonies and structures And all the various things that lock our wrists to the past...

...In the end, he summons a vision of the universal death by nuclear destruction that our age collectively fears: I felt the dawn's black augurs gather force As if I knew in the New Jersey night The downcast sky that was to clamp on Europe, That Asia had its future in my pocket...

...In "Einstein's Bathrobe," it seems appropriate, even understated, considering the horror the poem encompasses...

...It is also very much his own...

...His deepest taproots draw from Southern poets, however, especially John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren...

...This is as far as it goes, Where the deer browse the under story and jays leap through the trees, Where chain saws Whittle away at the darkness, and diesel rigs Carry our deaths all night through the endless rain...

...Wright is attempting to depict our struggle to overcome the trivialities and confusions of random existence, our effort to make sense of what happens to us and to believe our lives have some significance...

...Einstein's Bathrobe," the most ambitious, seeks to capture the essence of the century's absent-minded genius...

...After dark, from his camp, he could see the lights of a town by a lake, 3,000 feet below...

...Lost Bodies" meditates on human mutability and the doctrine of resurrection...

...That Moss' sense of mortality seems sharper here than in the past is no doubt a result of his recent heart attack...

...And does so, letting the grass go stiff, and the needles brown, Letting the dirt take over...

...Several poems describe the humiliation and terror of an intensive care ward...

...Wright's work has often been regarded as difficult to interpret...

...The heroic style needs large themes not to sound windy...

...It beats the alternative, the mighty working Set to subdue the celestial flesh...

...Howard Moss can toss off a villanelle with grace and relishes traditional poetic forms...

...In fact, one of the most charming aspects of his work is its many tiny "slices": A swimming pool becomes "this Mediterranean in a matchbox...

...Looking at Pictures" describes the photos, postcards and art reproductions the poet has collected over the years "of all I've thought most beautiful in the natural world...

...All things that come to him come under his feet In a glorious body, they say, And why not...

...The juxtaposition of Christ's promise with our own awareness of the decay around us and of mortality is characteristic of Wright's poetry...

...The speaker is the titular dressing gown, a favorite garment of the subj ect...

...It is proof of his strength that The Other Side of the River convinces us we can succeed...

...With them he shares an interest in speculations about eternal metaphysical verities, in his case remaining firmly planted in Christian theology...

...The author clearly has been influenced by the European tradition of choosing one's themes from mythology or history, then interweaving them with personal associations...

...Howard Moss loves to evoke the atmosphere of places...

...By the time the poem winds to its end, as if following a stream bed, we realize that the Savannah is another name for the River Jordan of spirituals or even for Lethe or Styx—waters to pass over after "a short life of trouble...

...an expanse of "Rooftop" provokes the question, "Rain, will there ever be enough/For the black-tarred roof / Desiring to become a mirror...

...From signs Phoenicians scratched into the sand With sticks he drew the contraries of space: Whirlwind Nothing and Volume in its rage Of matter racing to undermine itself, And when the planets sang, why, he sang back The lieder black holes secretly adore...

...These poems assemble facts, memories and visual images, juggling their arrangement until a pattern emerges...

...But these reminiscences are similes for the present as well...

...Rules of Sleep" describes how In the sludge drawer of animals in arms, Where the legs entwine to keep the body warm Against the winter night, some cold seeps through— It is the future: say, a square of stars In the windowpane, suggesting the abstract And large, or a sudden shift in position That lets one body know the other's free to move An inch away, and then a thousand miles, And, after that, even intimacy Is only another form of separation...

...11 Nothing will pry it loose...

...Another poem develops a homely gesture—the trick of making your own bed while still in it, useful for invalids—into an unheimlich conclusion: "Though death, I think, has more than clever/Household hints in mind and wants/The bed made once, and for good...

...Since this book, his sixth, clarifies his methods and Southern heritage, readers may now find his meaning more accessible...

...Wright mentions, for instance, that at 15 he climbed a mountain, with five days' supplies on a pack horse, to repair a fire tower...

...His eleventh collection of poems, Rules of Sleep (Atheneum, 62 pp., $12.95), conjures up vivid, sensual impressions of Manhattan, Miami Beach, Rome, Umbria, and diverse New England landscapes...

...For his poem about science Moss has transmuted into imagery an astounding amount of physics...

...Others dwell on the acute loneliness experienced by the critically ill, who learn that pain and death cannot be shared...

...Few modern poets could invoke the cliche of nature as a cathedral without blushing, even if arching boughs and the twilight songs of animals bring it to mind...

...And in "Arkansas Traveler," in the half-light the frogs begin from their sleep To ascend into darkness, Vespers recalibrate through the underbrush, the insect choir Offering its clear soprano Out of the vaulted gum trees into the stained glass of the sky...

...When the wind is loosened and borne up, The body is lightened and feels it too could float in the wind, A bell-sound between here and sleep...

...Nor is he afraid to adopt a conventional trope to serve a folksy purpose—he writes of "the gold lame of the moon" in a poem called "California Dreaming...

...He perceives us all as artists manque who improve on what we see or cut it down to our size...

...The intricately crafted Rules of Sleep surprises us again and again...

...Moss' more expansive pieces are equally impressive...

...Not even / Soaking...

...Or time...

...A spatula...

...Surely they will see that despite his contemporary diction, his use of sustained metaphor is wryly, deliberately old-fashioned...

...For the reader curious to see them the volume contains a snapshot of his bulletin board...

...Yet his sense of the world is more truly of the times than that of many younger writers...

...Although he does not plunk himself down squarely on either side of the debate, one senses that in his heart he believes in transfiguration...

...But the eye wanders From the large to the small, the mind takes in Only a single slice at a time Moss is a skilled miniaturist himself...

...Now he muses, These nights are like that, The silvery alphabet of the sea increasingly difficult to transcribe, And larger each year, everything farther away, and less clear, Than I want it to be, not enough time to do the job, And faint thunks in the earth, As though somewhere nearby a horse was nervously pawing the ground...

...In "The Light Put Out," dedicated to Charles Wright, the sea-cook pirate, Long John Silver is addressed as he seems to be coming through the poet's window: "A star behind you like a little, burned/Fried potato stuck to the sky...

...But, oh, how the hand yearns to make tall The toppled, how the imagination fashions Blueprints of former and future perfections — Weedless gardens where everything blooms On time and nothing attacks new growth For its own subsistence...

...The ear slides over the polished musical surface of these lines almost too quickly at first to grasp their meaning...