Evolving Traditionalists

...I searched for some clear thought behind the blind command Kenney did not master his style without a struggle, as several of the book's group of "First Poems" attest...

...George's Channel" does bog down under the weight of influence: Its beginning echoes Hopkins' "The Windhover...

...His special touch is stringing them together with subtitles that are the first phrase of a stanza, the last word of the previous one, or both...

...The effect is electric...

...His stanzas, typically, are 14 lines...

...Not knowing whether he will ever be able to " feel" again, he comes to a new self-assessment: What severings our lives observe...

...George's Channel pitched up gulls," or "the sky arched down like whalebone," seem to have been lifted from Robert Lowell's "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket...

...Shifts of perspective are what make much of A Slow Fuse tick—including the title poem, a too pat story with an O. Henry ending...

...Its corporal organization testifies to a reptilian heritage and to its departure from that line of development toward an airborne future...

...This poem, like many in^4 Slow Fuse, becomes a deeply moving dialogue with tradition...

...In his poems, as in theirs, words flower into puns and ambiguities: A Man-O'-War throws "gunlight" on the glassy sea...

...The retired magician is now in Milan," where every third thought shall be my grave," but he wonders about the Wild Man of the Island...

...It continues:"crack—recall it vividly as first fabric / ripping in the distance...

...This is handled brilliantly in the book's initial sequence, "The Hours of the Day...

...This way they look to me...

...Writers & Writing EVOLVING TRADITIONALISTS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL The cover of Richard Kenney' s The Evolution of the Flightless Bird (Yale, 68 pp., $12.95), winner of the 1983 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, shows a perfectly preserved fossil of an archaeopteryx...

...In his eleventh volume, Slow Fuse (Macmillan, 82 pp., $8.95), the ironically titled "Traveling Third Class" likens this process metaphorically to nature's perpetual recycling: Even more amazing, sunk into the scattered thoughts of someone dying and, dirt drowning you, emptied out into a worm's mouth, your jumbled cells now free in water taproots and someone else—a pike, a dusk-brave muskrat— drink...

...Meantime you, I the world/waiting on you, / played Narcissus never better/served...

...Each bone and hairy feather is clearly delineated...

...The central drama here involves a manuscript by Weiss that Bliicher borrowed to show to a publisher and is thought to have lost in a taxi, until Arendt finds it among his papers after his death...

...Lives he still...

...The most ambitious narrative, "Every Second Thought," spoken in the voice of Prospero, serves as a companion piece to "Caliban Remembers" from Weiss' 1968 volume, The Last and the First...

...He evidently worried for a time about being imitative...

...And still, sprawled back beneath a bee-spun canopy of woodbine, sunk in dreams of the heavens opening to shower on him ceaseless bounty, forms danced round his head midges pied in a hum, remembers you...

...Indeed, most of Kenney's inherited baggage becomes new through his treatment of the verse form he has taken over, the sonnet cycle...

...for a while the patterns seem secure, and hold us...

...The title, conjuring the German rallying cry for Lebensraum that precipitated Arendt's flight from her homeland, also announces the poet's quest for space to be himself while dealing with such powerful presences...

...It also acknowledges that anything we can recognize outside ourselves is a fragile, but triumphant, contact with the mysterious world...

...Obsolete language—"scry," "purpure"—comes out of the storeroom, not for period color, but to recreate an unfamiliar fashion...

...Theodore Weiss has long proclaimed his allegiance to therenewal of poetic tradition...

...The "First Poems" aside, Kenney has never seemed driven by the pursuit of originality...

...Kenney' s ancestors seem to be those passionate Victorians, Browning and Hopkins...

...One could not conceive a more explicit or appropriate symbol than the oldest known avian for this poet's compact, quirky lines layered with the fossilized remnants of tradition...

...I sat with a broken / neck and watched the first summer thunderheads...

...The isle abounded...

...Not least because he attempts the task of preservation, Richard Kenney's continuing evolution promises many exciting discoveries...

...tendons shrink, all spindles fray, and nerves—I never felt my right hand's first involuntary flexion (one ribbon torn and spun down from the cerebrospinal Maypole, clutched)—clench taut again—misfire...

...the poet confesses, "I've jeweled old memories in mind with such care...

...Disparate ideas marry in a single metaphor: A window pane of hand-blown Colonial crown glass links the molten world solidifying and the effort to draw breath while in pain...

...The conclusion of the opening poem—"Sand-painting here erased, in retrospect, by arc-" —glides into a subtitle—Light—that is also the lead word of the next sonnet...

...One sees the poet's mind swing out from a recollection to grasp at a series of more diffuse memories suggested by it, then tie these back to the original inspiration...

...Its 24 sonnets center around the speaker's recovery from a serious spinal injury...

...The narrator of "The Hours of the Day" must confront them in enforced stillness and helplessness...

...The epigraph of the opening piece in this collection, "A Living Room," dedicated to the memories of Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Bliicher, insists: "The past is never dead, it is not even past...

...Examining his voice in the old manuscript, Weiss begins to perceive his relationship to the couple as even more essential than he had supposed it to be: And I not looking back, yet looking, feeling like an ore long buried struck or like a river as it, riding, deepens for its travels down inside a cavern out to sea, these two (have they not waited all this time ahead of me...

...It is difficult, the poet tells us, to preserve the past at all...

...But even a child hears blood in the conch, and feels the breaking away, bits of shell-coral and life's lining carried away with the shattering rush, rivers, and the sea, and across—the streaked gong bronze corrodes, and cracks, and the child diminishes—a skirl of snow blousing in the cold wind, small choregos lost against a painted sky, and gone...

...Just as his verse consists of the thoughts of others, he realizes, so future poetry may be made of his poems...

...Sometimes, in surgery, halved arteries retract into respective trunks, elastic, lost, and vanishing like snakes' tongues...

...On the contrary, a threnody runs throughout The Evolution of the Flightless Bird mourning the loss of old "patterns...

...break, sparkling, forth upon the blood's wholehearted tide out of this stream of notes, a storming, my breath dares to flourish in the dark...

...Weiss' Prospero would gladly exchange his former Faustian thirst for knowledge as power with the monster's chthonic intuitions: "What things I he saw, what things he knew, had/to to survive: the private/ lives / of beetle, otter, bat,/shifty moods of day and night...

...other lines, such as "And then St...

...By the ending, however, the poet has retrieved part of his territory from his rapacious ghosts...

...some have a rhyme scheme, others are quite loose...

...Browning, too, used Caliban as a mouthpiece to explore "Natural Religion," and both of Weiss' Tempest poems are so indebted to him that a reader ignorant of "Caliban upon Setebos" will be missing quite a bit...

...And so you take yourself from every hand, this apple, plumped with people rampant in its tangy flesh, news of yourself about to be The poem affirms Weiss' belief that poets should imagine themselves "wandering around in someone else's head...

...Where great birds, unbridled, saurian, renowned for their capacity in middle earth once raced the flat limestone horizons underfoot, where air speed slipped on ground speed, shrieking like asbestos burned away to nothing, to air—then burst all bounds, bones elongate, light, antique and delicate and wheeling, wheeling in the windy city of the birds again...