Sound and Sense in Poetry

...Paper Cities" concerns intersections between life and art, and the way they intensify under the pressure of powerful emotions...

...Schnackenberg possesses a child's ability to wholly absorb herself in whatever she contemplates...

...Afraid that misery may be destroying her sanity, she picks King Lear off the shelf and imagines him as he "sits in his jail, cut to the brains" by his own reverses: He spreads his drenched map And waits til/ it dries, Then folds it into a pointed hat, And the faded countries wave in his hair Like tattered butterflies...

...Despite all this here-and-now verisimilitude, I suspect Clampitt's popularity rests more on her use of traditional poetic devices—assonance, alliteration, internal rhyme, the vocative tense...

...Clampitt loves to describe tiny details, but she is not a miniaturist...

...In "The Spruce Has No Taproot," a pet cat unwilling to move to the city with its mistress escapes in the Maine woods where it starves to death...

...She envisions Louise raising her eyes from one of the letters to watch clouds that soon float into the poet's world...

...But the battles fought by poets in the'50s and '60s against Modernist values need not be taken up again by writers in the '80s...

...They both recognize a universe of ideas outside their own personal impressions and treat form as an enhancement and delight, rather than a trap...

...Patterns symbolize emotional complexity for Schnackenberg...

...GJERTRUDE SCHNACKENBERG'S The Lamplit Answer (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 83 pp., $ 12.95) is also a second book worthy of its well-received predecessor, her beguiling Portraits and Elegies (\9%2...

...Schnackenberg and Clampitt represent a change in current poetic style...

...The sequence "Voyages: A Homage to John Keats" tries to imagine the tubercular youth's state of mind as he wrests poetry and love from his fast approaching annihilation...

...In a series of metaphysical conceits, "Urn-Burial and the Butterfly Migration," she contemplates death and resurrection against vignettes of Midwestern landscapes...

...He lies down in his boots and overcoat, And shuts his eyes...

...The images of "Paper Cities'" poignantly demonstrate how grief can suppress all other feelings: Everything serves to remind the sufferer of despair...

...This playful yet sharp observation recalls Marianne Moore, as does Clampitt's enjoyment elsewhere of such arcane words as" frore" and "osmotic...

...How simply, how humorously she summarizes the geologic records that buttressed Darwin's evolutionary arguments...

...The secrets to be revealed behind each door, though, cannot live up to the excitement of expectation...

...In lime, in deepening blue ice...

...Ringing Doorbells" speaks of "that night for Gene/McCarthy at the edge/of Little Italy...

...Musing on the impulse to distance ourselves from those we love, she observes: "Tonight the giant galaxies outside/Are tiny, tiny on my window pane...

...O friable repose of the organic...

...After confronting her brother's terminal illness "From A Clinic Waiting Room," the poet mourns him with "A Curfew...

...From the fenced beanfield, crickets' scrannel plucks the worn reed of individual survival...

...Like Clampitt, Schnackenberg has a religious, metaphysical mind, butsheismoreofaformalist...

...Love Letter," about the comic, heartbreaking indignities of being a slave to one's feelings, uses the jaunty rhyme royal of Byron's" Don Juan"—an ironic yet rueful commentary on the same subject...

...My books are towers," she says, "Rooms, dreams whose scenes tangle.' Later, while she is reading a fairy tale, a goose feather plucked by a weeping kitchen maid also drifts into the poet's surroundings...

...Bark-creviced at the trunks' foot, ladybirds' enameled herds gather for the winter, red pearls of an unsaid rosary to waking...

...Clampittmade her debut in 1983 with The Kingfisher, a remarkably accomplished collection...

...an annus mirabilis of odes before the season/of the oozing ciderpress, the harvest done,/wheatfields blood-spattered once with poppies, gone/ to stubble now, the swallows fretting to begin/their windborne flight toward a Mediterranean/that turned to marble as the mists closed in/on the imagination's yet untrodden region—/ the coal-damps, the foul winter dark of London...

...Advent Calendar" revives a girlhood memory of paper representations designed to teach children the meaning of this Christian season of anticipation: "Picture boxes in the stars/Open up like cupboard doors/In a cabinet Jesus built," she marvels...

...The adult author can only establish contact with her through fresh miseries...

...That is not to dismiss "Voyages...

...This befalls much of the Keatsian sequence, a rather imaginative excursion into literary criticism that has more than a slight resemblance to Helen Vendler's study of the Odes...

...The poet, reading a collection of Flaubert's letters, identifies her own lover's withdrawal with Flaubert's treatment of Louise, the mistress he neglected for his writing...

...Even when Clampitt is not at her zenith, she remains a superb redactor of other people's thoughts...

...Most often, as in the conclusion to "Darwin in 1881," she employs it unaffectedly: He lies down on the quilt, He lies do wn like a fabulous headed Fossil in a vanished riverbed...

...The Curfew" notes that her brother died the day Poland was being placed under martial law...

...The pleasure of reading Amy Clampitt comes, in part, from one's delight in the counterpoint between complex ideas and an intricate language that sings...

...She needs space to develop the ideas that flow out of each trope in veritable rocket-bursts of showers, explosions and stars, all suddenly forming a unity...

...This is not backsliding toward the Modernism that dominated the first decades of the 20th century...

...Urn-Burial," likemostofherbestpoems,isquitelong...

...In ocean drifts, in canyon floors, in silt...

...Keats' strength, however, was his obdurate refusal to use the pathos of his situation...

...Drawings of ordinary toys, "Wooden soldier, wooden sword...

...These women arc true Romantics...

...Even in the new volume's opening sequence, "Kremlin of Smoke,'- a fictional portrait of Chopin, blank verse keeps breaking into rhyme...

...Hints of something bought and sold/Hints of murder in the stars" lead the child to a darker religious mystery—the revelation of a suffering world...

...The copious notes to her poems consist of passages by writers whose inspiration has sparked hers...

...In common with other recent poets who have made Keats a subject of their verse, Clampitt cannot forbear mentioning everything he kept out of his own work: "He'd presently begin to resurrect, to all but/deify the issue of his own wretched climate...

...Occasionally ideas take control...

...Black Buttercups," alament for Clampitt's own childhood in "the hinterlands" of Iowa, concludes with a memory of waking to a February morning leprous with frost above the dregs of a half-hearted snowfall, to find the gray world of adulthood everywhere, as though there never had been any other, in that same house I could not bear to leave, where even now the child who wept to leave still sits weeping at the thought of exile...

...These lines are certainly moving...

...Clampitt's sensibilities are contemporary, sometimes trendy...

...Clampitt's girlhood-self seems imprisoned on the wrong side of the looking glass at the moment of first sorrow...

...They are far from the least interesting section of her books...

...Poetry's musical heritage bestows a resonance now often abjured, thanks to a neopuritanism that associates sincerity with lack of adornment...

...In cliffs obscured as clouds gather and float...

...One is hardly surprised to discover that the poem first appeared in the Anglican Theological Review...

...Amy Clampitt and Gjertrud Schnackenberg arc two outstanding members of a growing poetic movement devoted to both sound and sense...

...She has written ecology-minded verse, a save-the-whale poem, and one called "The Godfather Returns to Color TV...

...Although she is middle-aged, and possesses a distinctive voice, her style evokes traits more fashionable 20 or 30 years ago: The gooseberry's no doubt an oddity, an outlaw or pariah even—thorny and tart as any kindergarten martinet, it can harbor like a fernseed, on its leaves' underside, bad news for pine trees, whereas the spruce resists the blister rust it's host to...

...Rhyme comes so naturally to her that you would hardly be surprised to find sheconverses in it...