Alien Voices

...Yet even where she employs English poetry's most traditional forms, rich in historical associations, her own voice sings out clearly...

...I lusted only a couple of years...

...I rotted like a pear...

...with Henry Purcell in Japan (Knopf,74pp.,$13.95), her first book, Mary Jo Salter makes an impressive debut...

...Bare-breasted women and rat-ribbed men...

...The main thingis to write/ for the joy of it," he scolds the poet: Let others wear the sackcloth and the ashes...

...Most of these ghosts martyred themselves for the beliefs of others, felt "doomed to the decent thing...

...There, the devout make "stations" of fasting and prayers, barefoot, around the stones that mark the walls of a medieval monastery...

...In white face, wig, kimono, here's a Bride...

...Those who can do that successfully see the familiar strangely enough to make it new again...

...in fact, the poem "Inch by Inch" might pass as a companion piece to "Velvet Shoes...

...Naturally, this is James Joyce, patron of exiles who have sacrificed personal ties to art...

...Japanese Characters" relates her attempts to master ideographs...

...What should we call the lanes between the stars, or the silence burning even at the cores of those so bright they make us feverish...

...In this setting, he imagines that he has encountered ghosts who confront his tangled feelings...

...Perhaps to wish less fervently the Romans will march in dispensing justice: for every man one vote, for every voice a single character...

...Life in Japan cut her off from everything familiar, so that even Western transplants became enchantingly, terrifyingly new...

...The bulk of Salter's poems tell of foreign places where she has lived...

...The majority of these—such as James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover( 1976-82) or Alfred Corn's Notes from a Child of Paradise (1984)— have been ambitious autobiographies...

...Rownan...

...These spirits divide into the "the two worlds" that haunt him...

...Perhaps it would be a mistake for him to take Joyce's ghostly counsel...

...Remembering England, she thinks, "At times it seemed the country itself was a cloud / high up on the map, a sheepwool shape in the sea...

...Everything wasted...

...Works in the style of the Commedia have been appearing with some frequency of late...

...No contemporary poet writing in English makes better use of regional words...

...Yeats' Celtic Twilight movement provoked subsequent generations to reconsider the question of " native language...

...Although each has a distinctive voice, both unite in seeking, as Salter puts it, "To look into a word as though a window / and address the thing itself...

...But these scrawled thought-balloons / Remind me you're imprisoned/By art...

...The site is near the Northern Irish border—not far from County Wicklow, where Heaney grew up...

...Notes to other poems in the book explain that he was "transformed into a bird-man and exiled to the trees by the curseof St...

...Her style is witty and deft...

...He considers that he inhabits two worlds: a primitive one of ancient ties to the land, and thecivilized culture of books...

...His voice eddying with the vowels of all rivers...

...His poems are pastoral, filled with mythic resonances...

...Salter's graceful tone seems modeled on George Herbert's appreciation for nuances of mood, for the significance of things often unnoticed...

...An astute reader may discern affinities between some of Salter's reactions as an American trying to make sense of Japan and herself, and those described in a recent novel by Brad Leithauser, Equal Distances...

...Another group of specters, all writers, put forward a different outlook...

...The title refers to a popular Irish pilgrimage site, also known for its putative founder as Patrick's Purgatory...

...On the one hand, there are shades of youthful companions who stayed behind when he left, or who lived up to expectations he failed to fulfill: a first girlfriend, schoolmasters, relatives killed by Protestant extremists, friends executed before the eyes of their families...

...William Carlton, a 19th-centuryturn-coat who deserted Catholicism for the established Church, then wrote a caustic account of the Station Island pilgrimage, notices something in Heaney's manner "that strikes me as defensive," and lectures: If times were hard, I could be hard too...

...Let go, let fly, forget...

...More important, however, it gave him an opportunity to confront his uncertainties about the worth of sectarian involvement versus the artist's necessary objectivity...

...She wonders, "Didn't Michelangelo sketch "cartoons' / on his jail walls...

...others in Western chairs I...

...her eye spots ironic relationships between dissimilar objects, as well as the unintentional puns English words frequently produce: Just as all life appears to have begun the moment we were born, so around the sun of native language orbit distant bodies in atmospheres indigenously vague: seen as through clouds, that's Venus thickly wrapped in idioms colorful and yet inapt, and Saturn's ring spins far too fast to wear...

...One boyhood friend, "a young priest, glossy as a blackbird,' describes the South American mission where he died of fever: 'The rain forest,' he said, 'you 've never seen the like of it...

...Now strike your note...

...Before he left, Heaney explored different forms of Irish anxiety...

...I made the traitor in me sink the knife...

...This gave him the satisfaction of imagining his enemies in Hell, of course...

...He likes to explain at readings how his own verse tries to weave "a mat of sound as thick and sturdy as Anglo-Saxon poetry...

...Heaney has managed to elude that threatening influence, and has carved out his own station...

...On his departure from the holy site, Heaney is helped by a blind man who walks "straight as a rush/upon his ash plant...

...But many bewail the futility of their lives or endings...

...Salter and Leithauser are married, and he too is a brilliant poet...

...at the same time, he displays a vast knowledge of literary associations, a command of traditional rhetoric and reference...

...Born and raised in Northern Ireland, he abandoned its escalating, numbing violence for Eire in 1972...

...It remains to be seen whether Station Island will purge Heaney of his thematic material, releasing him to fresh subjects...

...Salter keeps reminding the reader that poets must not reiterate what is easily said, but push back the boundaries of language toward what has heretofore been inexpressible...

...Most of the shorter poems in this volume, like the beautiful "Chekhov on Sakhalin,'' a eulogy for Thomas Hardy, or the Sweeney cycle, continue to dwell on separation and guilt...

...Sometimes she chafes against barriers...

...An old Sabbath-breaking woodchopper, remembered from childhood, warns Heaney to "Stay clear of all processions...

...You 've listened long enough...

...Station Island," which makes up a third of Heaney's seventh collection, is the most effective vehicle he has yet found to dramatize his ambivalences...

...Seamus Heaney's Station Island(Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 123pp., $11.95) is more concentrated in scope, yet unlike most other modern disciples he has a kinship with the Florentine master—he is in exile (albeit self-imposed...

...Eventually, she relishes the pictograph's ambiguities enough to take a new look at our stiff Latin letters, so lacking in mystery: What am I learning, then...

...Very little of Henry Purcell in Japan sounds derivative, though...

...From subtle clues, one surmises that he is a stand-in for the poet's mythological hero: King Sweeney of Ulster...

...Should they reject the tongue of the occupier, or at least separate themselves from the "English"poetic tradition...

...I sweated masses...' Confronted with so many unhappy stories, Heaney begs them to "forgive my timid circumspect involvement...

...Over and over, she pays tribute to the language as " a heritage so deep / so long a part of me it seems / the very state of God...

...A great deal of contemporary poetry traces its ancestry back to a few sources: Wordsworth, Keats, Dickinson, Whitman...

...Too many modern Irish poets have lost their own voices, bewitched by the lyrics of Yeats...

...When Salter chooses themes too small to exercise her pro-sodic and mental arabesques comfortably, she takes on the porcelain brittleness of Elinor Wylie...

...He saw the poem as clarifying his own purposes...

...Heaney himself has always been attracted to that heritage...

...Conversant in the automatic doors I of an alphabet we barely need to press / for meaning sprung wide open," she finds the fluid strokes of Japanese writing a jumble, until each pictograph begins to take on a"character," a personality of its own: "Old women, bent at pained diagonals / like orchid grass...

...Love Poem for a Poet" describes her writer-husband's habit of scribbling lines that come to him inthenightontheir bedroom wall...

...And maybe there's a lesson there for you...

...Since then, his poetry has revealed a bystander's guilt as he has watched his former countrymen struggle to the death from his safe refuge...

...A murdered cousin convicts the poet for "the way you whitewashed ugliness" through art, "and sac-charined my death with morning dew...