Playful Pastoral Voices

...I suspect that this almost too tight control stems from the kind of poetry Brad Leithauser and Henri Cole have chosen to write...

...Diana and the Adder," for example, presents the eye with an excellent pun as it snakes its way down the page in graceful curves...

...A Japanese moss garden, "so fragile it's never raked, but swept," is examined so minutely that each plush shape is enumerated, every subtle color named...

...In this whorled environment, the mind meets not tranquility merely, but some dim image of itself—the rounded mounds, the seams dense with smaller seams, the knit, knobbed filaments all suggesting the cranium, as witnessed from within...

...The " cats" of the title are really tigers, painted by a Japanese artist who had never seen one alive...

...The title poem probes the boy' s anxious realization that his mother has a hidden existence of her own, quite apart from his...

...Leithauser does this with a seahorse, who "Like the chess piece/ He so resembles...

...And the great clappers of rainfall made one fancy Noah's ark drydocked on the lawn, ready to sail...

...When his mother returns and catches him in this act of rifling, he feels his "head fogged with...her perfume.' Cole's exploration of his younger selves is always from the perspective of the present, as though the grown man were watching a home movie...

...Cole experiments with perspective as if he were someone alternately looking through the two ends of a telescope, and his delightful shifts from tiny to gigantic are accomplished with a dexterity that reminds us of Lewis Carroll...

...That is to say, our own/Like-winged, light-winged/Pegasus—he can be taken/As an embodiment/ Of that obscure fount/And unaccountable buoyancy/Of artistic inspiration...

...Rabbits: A Valentine" considers a species "for whom even sex is not complex...

...Dorothy's Fossils" begins in a Jurassic sea with the capture of an "algal blue" fish by a duckbill dinosaur...

...Nature poetry often turns the observed into allegory...

...glides/With a forking, oblique/Efficiency, the winglike/Fins behind his ears aflutter;/And like that long /Unmastered steed...

...Ninety million years later" a little girl named Dorothy—the narrator's "childhood mate"— has fallen asleep on a fieldstone after "our wriggling play...

...As a young man he surreptitiously examines "Father's Jewelry Box" during his mother's absence...

...Robert Penn Warren, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and their numerous epigones laid on the violence, madness and death with heavy hands...

...In another bit of whimsy, Cole describes driving " in a Lilliputian car across a mammoth landscape/towards the south, the sea looming like Gulliver in our hearts...

...But it is the adult who says: I am the child with his magnifying glass blazing the hearts from insects then scattering their skeletal ash The boy would have imagined himself a scientist...

...With scientific curiosity, he studies such details as its turreted eyes that move independently of each other and the male pouch in which the eggs gestate...

...The buck rabbit, especially, is seen as inhabiting a masculine Eden where he makes a female conquest and forgets while composing no explanations, damnations, grand pleadings or vows— disengages and instantly begins to browse, lifting to all eyes his eyes (oh, those lovable black bunny eyes...

...it is as if they were cultivating literary bonzai gardens...

...In "Hesitancy," about an ostrich at the Kyoto Zoo, Leithauser invokes the kinship we sometimes feel with captive animals, and then—as if extracting a moral from a fable—avers that "If we are not free, we would like to be...

...Perhaps the "playful minds" and lyric gifts of Cole and Leithauser signal a new era of classicism...

...BRAD LEITHAUSER is a poet of the same generation and shares certain characteristics with Henri Cole...

...Their prosody employs elegant manipulations of rhyme and meter...

...One wishes that Leithauser, who draws his own images from life with acute fidelity, would occasionally let himself go and create something possessing the exuberant menace of the Japanese artist's felines...

...innocent and intelligent...

...In his otherworldliness,'' Leithauser concludes," He heartens us...

...They seem to be reacting against an earlier literary generation for whom melodrama and emotional extravagance were stock devices...

...Here the poet breaks off spinning his metaphor to take note of a spider—more bizarrely shaped and ingenious than any creature one could dream up—as it stalks through this microcosm...

...In "Midnight Sailing on the Chesapeake" the poet's ailing father briefly becomes a young man again: "We cannot tell ourselves apart...

...Members of the animal kingdom come across as enviable here because they do not suffer from self-consciousness...

...Their unifying theme, it gradually emerges, is transcendence of the self...

...Cole's writing here resonates with his juvenile passion for Dorothy, giving emotional depth to what would otherwise simply be exquisite depiction...

...Leithauser intends his second volume of poetry, Cats of The Temple (Knopf, 70 pp., $14.95), to be "asibling companion" to his first, Hundreds ofFireflies(19$2).lnfact, the new book demonstrates even more clearly than its predecessor what marvelous powers of description this poet has...

...Instead, recalling Emerson's "transparent eyeball," he tries to depict things as they are before going on to give them some wider application in his verse...

...Their pelts are correctly depicted (drawn from skins), but the faces are borrowed from Chinese dragons—those popeyed, smiling countenances, half fierce, half comic...

...She may be a "marble queen," yet she sits with her son "beneath the whorish scent of magnolia...

...Miniature details receive loving attention from these men...

...Leithauser's oriental gardens, though saturated with beauty and significance, are sometimes lacking in drama...

...Cole's observations, for all their accuracy, take on significance from his own emotional projections...

...He comes upon a "Masonic medallion with an eye-/ of-God as sad as a crocodile's"—obviously an enchanted parent-surrogate witnessing his oedipal trespass...

...Equally fond of effecting dislocations in time, Cole also slips effortlessly between past and present...

...Yet beneath these similarities lies a fundamental difference...

...A vague feeling of adult insecurity makes him "wish to be small/as every child's fantasy of Swift's island/small enough to be in a soup spoon,/ just a speck in an ignorant world...

...For all his urbanity, Cole's touch is light and even inclines to playfulness...

...Such psychological truths abound, and frequently are conveyed by Freudian fairy tales...

...In "Dorothy's Fossils" and "Diana and the Adder," where symbolic action fills in ellipses, the tone is lighthearted...

...They are both formalists, their concern extending equally to the poem's sense, sound and appearance on the page...

...Often Cole's observations evoke a child's imagination...

...But the biographical information on the dust jacket assures us that although the 30-year-old poet has had some verse published in magazines, this is his first book...

...Leithauser, by contrast, does not seek to impose personal meanings on his surroundings...

...The cultivated poems of these two young poets, and a number of their contemporaries, deliberately exclude that kind of hysteria...

...They favor, rather, apastoral tradition in which art is used to restore a sense of harmony, restraint and order to a chaotic world...

...Both have absorbed a particular Oriental influence—Cole was born in Japan, and Leithauser lived there recently (he portrayed the country in his 1985 novel, Equal Distance...

...The mature poet makes his childish act of destruction a metaphor for the cruelty of the artist who scrutinizes his own relationships as if they were specimens under a microscope...

...A dream of release figures in a great many of these poems...

...As creatures of the imagination, these temple guardians were designed to "beckon/you into the preserve/of a rare, ferociously/playful mind...

...Thus after exploring "The Biblical Garden at St...

...Once the mother-figure enters, however, an unsettling atmosphere develops...

...John the Divine in New York City," where the cathedral's ponderous sou th transept towers over the treetops, he muses: Everything looked authentic and frail...

...The prehistoric ocean has dried up, but Dorothy's'' carrot-red hair like sea-lettuce sweeping/above the tall aquatic grass" seems to recreate the ancient scene for a moment, anticipating the discovery of the fish fossil, "its perfect spine unearthed and electric beside her...

...Writers & Writing PLAYFUL PASTORAL VOICES BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL HENRI COLE'S The Marble Queen (Atheneum, 64 pp., $15.00) is so polished, we might easily take it to be the latest collection by an established writer...

...Having offered this symbolical construction, the poet cannot resist returning to the exact description of this little pipefish...