Poetry Read in Canoes

...whom people still read in canoes...

...Back in 1962, Randall Jarrell, remembering the earlier celebrity of Edna St...

...He moves from the classical, where "To become oneself is so exhausting/that I am as others have made me,/imitating monumental Greek statuary...

...Throughout the 1920s, the art still had stars whose works were eagerly gobbled up by the same audience that read novels and nonfiction best sellers...

...Reading The Visible Man, however, we never feel prurient...

...Her brief note, which will appear In the local Leader, contains a phrase ("She chanted snatches of old lands ") That will muddle the town for three days...

...Both are fourth volumes by writers just entering middle age, experienced in their craft, yet continuing to radiate youthful verve...

...A she-wolf suckled the young,/Who would hunt each other...

...At one point the poet attempts a "Self-portrait as Four Styles of Pompeian Wall Painting...

...A young woman buys a full tank of gas and chats pleasantly with the filling station attendant, then drives to the edge of a cliff where teenagers go to "make out," leaves the car's headlights shining and drowns herself in the ocean...

...a great aunt who was a kept woman...

...it is a brave, even graceful attempt to find what is most vulnerable underneath all the armor and stage props we use to buttress our egos...

...to a crowd scene that whispers of anonymous sexual couplings revealing a furtive but basic human contact—the underworld of Roman homosexuality described by writers from the ancients to James Merrill...

...through Roman still-life, where "Unable to care for People, I care/mostly for things...

...Many of these new poems are set in a Roman landscape, and the Eternal City—typifying so many eras of Western history—becomes an effective backdrop for Cole's self-revealing drama...

...The early books of both men were charming, but guarded...

...This is no emotional striptease...

...Now he can say, as Emily Dickinson did, "I like the look of agony/Because I know it's true—" or, as he puts it, that he wants "To write what is human, not escapist...

...Weaker verse might play civilization against the innocence of nature...

...He seeks to peel away the surface dressings to get at what is elemental to our natures...

...For Cole this has produced a new style, naked and intense, sometimes painfully so...

...missing poems, no...

...Even nature often takes on a human face...

...To Leithauser, this exchange gives the story an even more Shakespearean flavor...

...In the limestone fountain lay lizards and Fanta cans, where Truth once splashedfrom The Source...

...Henri Cole speaks plainly, which is refreshing...

...Populist schools claiming to be more accessible than "academic" poetry actually target limited subcultures, while the Pulitzer and National Book Critics Circle prize winners gamer ample critical praise but scant audiences...

...The Visible Man is just the book to enjoy in a canoe, perhaps on a lake spangled with falling colored leaves, the shape of branches beginning to show once more through the thinning foliage—where our own autumnal thoughts can respond to this intelligent and honest poet...

...In the end, the insoluble enigma of the girl's motive for self-destruction blends into the texture of the natural life going on around us: Soon, whether She's found or not...

...A Detective Gregg Messing Will answer, tersely, "Afraid Its not our bailiwick...

...Vincent Millay, wrote, "One thinks with awe and longing of this real and extraordinary popularity of hers: If only there were some poet...

...The good news is that in recent years there have been a growing number of volumes perfectly suited to being read the same way one might sit down with A.S...

...None of us can quite bear to be entirely exposed in all our frailty and failings to another person, much less the world...

...Sometimes it is breathtakingly beautiful, at other times it is distasteful or even horrible, yet, in the poet's eyes, it is perpetually fascinating...

...Leithauser's The Odd Last Thing She Did begins appealingly with storytelling: a honeymoon trainjoumey from New York to Quebec through snowy landscapes...

...He goes from strength to strength and manages to surprise us at every turn...

...Wade Pins it to Ophelia—and reprimands The police, who, this but goes to show...

...I cannot guess what this gifted and ambitious poet may choose to try next...

...More important, he strikes us as candid, trying to come as close to complicated truths as possible...

...The title poem tells of an unexplained suicide...

...Have not the barest knowledge of Shakespeare, Else would never have misread "lauds As "lands...

...This is not to dismiss the serious purpose either of such novels or the equivalent poems...

...Henri Cole, like Brad Leithauser, began as a formalist...

...When the late Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters briefly scaled the best seller list last year, it was assumed— probably correctly—that most buyers were after its biographical revelations about Sylvia Plath, rather than its author's prosodie skill...

...It is amoral and destructive, as in the Doria Pamphili garden where "families of nutria are eradicating—/with webbed hind feet,/blunt muzzled heads/and long orange incisors—/Pope Innocent X's pleasure garden's/ecosystem...

...Triptich: A Marsh in March" first sees the desiccated cattails as the detritus of a wild New Year's Eve party, their fat brown cylindrical heads suggestive of "tight-knit politicos/murmuring, nodding, prodding at each other//with their ponderous cigars...

...Rome itself is like its famous ancient statue of the legendary founders, Romulus and Remus...

...Each has subsequently moved away from self-protection to revelation...

...It is merely to say that you won't be put off by a baffling surface, or feel they might make more sense if you could remember more of your college professors' lectures about literary theory...

...Nor will your pleasure be constantly frustrated by urgent trips to the dictionary or other reference books...

...the "family archivist" who, having an uneventful life herself, lived vicariously through her relatives...

...Poem portraits have always been endearing, flourishing from the 17th- and 18th-century satirists through Robert Browning, Frost, Masters, and E. A. Robinson...

...Leithauser—who has recently proved himself a novelist, as well—handles the form with panache...

...But then along came the modernists, who dismissed these poets—except Frost—and set up a new canon...

...The uncovering of the authentic self is always a painful process...

...her lights will draw Moths and tiny dark-winged things that might Be dirt-clumps, ashes...

...through Augustan severity...

...Thus contemporary poetry built up accretions of artifice, till fewer and fewer readers felt it worth their while to discover what all those words, images, allusions, and techniques might actually be saying...

...Come what may, The night will be lovely, as she foresaw After all, we understand very little of the world that surrounds us...

...Now, in The Odd Last Thing She Did, stories of peoples' lives characterize his work...

...By the spring thaw, new plants stretching out tendrils and leaves resemble "the cups, the bare/plates, the empty, peremptory hands//of their upstart beggardom...

...In the days of high modernism, critics spoke of "mask" and "persona" as the necessary tools of the writer, who was really talking about "art," not how life must be lived...

...Even though the material may not be pretty, such poetry conveys the sort of deep enjoyment that we get from watching the tragedies of the Greeks or the Elizabethan playwrights: the catharsis of unmasking, the pleasurable shock aroused by certain kinds of violence that strike a chord in our own nature...

...Although many schools of poetry have come and gone in the ensuing decades, none has managed to recapture the readership once regularly enj oyed by books of verse...

...Nevertheless, his lyricism makes disturbing subjects awe-inspiring, like the eighth-century panel of a lion devouring a human that illustrates the cover of The Visible Man...

...It evokes those plays of the Bard where clowns and pedants are forever intruding on the tragic action...

...Robert Frost's North of Boston, Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, Stephen Vincent Benét's John Brown's Body, the lyrics of Sara Teasdale and Elinor Wylie—all sold prodigiously and were widely discussed...

...Only in his third verse collection, The Mail from Anywhere (1991), did he begin to limn character sketches...

...Until a Professor E.H...

...When he feels he has caught a glimpse, as In the little garden of the Villa Sciarra, I found a decade of poetry dead...

...Byatt's Possession or the latest Peter Ackroyd—for fun...

...Once Cole's subject was artifice...

...Leithauser started out describing landscape and still life...

...Here, nature is far more comfortable and attractive...

...Language was more than a baroque wall-fountain...

...Two recent specimens of happily accessible verse are Brad Leithauser's The Odd Last Thing She Did (Knopf, 83 pp., $22.00) and Henri Cole's The Visible Man (Knopf, 67 pp., $22.00...

...his words rise toward an ecstatic pitch: How pleased I was and defiant because a dry basin meant the end of description & rhyme, which had nursed and embalmed me at once...

...Missing Persons, yes...