The Return of Romanticism
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
On Poetry THE RETURN OF ROMANTICISM By Phoebe Pettingell Poetic tastes have taken numerous turnings throughout the 20th century, and now they seem to be doubling back to where they began—with...
...Nevertheless, except for her specific references to the process, this does not seem to be the production of someone slowing with the years...
...This piece reminds me of Nathaniel Hawthorne's essay on the joys of planting squash...
...But it is their words on the page that make it possible for us to share vicariously their sense of accomplishment in manual work...
...Being "neither a young writer nor a middleaged writer but whatever comes next," she says, "I find a compelling reason to write something revealing, a little, my private and natural self...
...Indeed, she fittingly leaves us with an image of the return of spring and freshness...
...By the '50s, the repressed had returned in the angry Freudian voices of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and their followers...
...Their voices and styles are widely varied...
...In the early decades, lyrics were modeled on Elizabethan songs and sonnets, or 19th-century paeans to Nature...
...But sometimes it wasn't at all enough...
...Both writers invoke the heft and satisfactions of a labor that is not as mental as writing...
...In a fine touch, the place of their meeting is in a hotel fronting Niagara Falls—whose thunderous roar suggests the sinister Reichenbach Falls where Conan Doyle tried to kill off Holmes...
...Having won many of the major prizes a contemporary poet may hope for, she is concerned that others will fill in certain blanks if she does not...
...Her voice—especially in essays—is utterly distinctive, in keeping with her old-fashioned stance about the relationship between writer and public...
...From there she moves on to Sherlock Holmes and his Watson, literary creations of an increasingly resentful Arthur Conan Doyle, who would rather devote himself to psychic research than to satisfying the public demand for further adventures of his hyperrational detective...
...So she constructed a one-room building of flotsam and found lumber and nails and shingles...
...Her form of expression is as quirky as her mind—uncluttered by small talk and phatic communion...
...In one of her previous collections of prose, Blue Pastures (1995), she told the story of living for a few years at Steepletop, home of Edna St...
...In past volumes she strove to blend into her subject—to become, as Emerson phrased it, a "transparent eyeball" observing what is...
...Vincent Millay, and hearing the dead poet's sister tell stories about her...
...Salter has a sharp eye for ironies...
...On Poetry THE RETURN OF ROMANTICISM By Phoebe Pettingell Poetic tastes have taken numerous turnings throughout the 20th century, and now they seem to be doubling back to where they began—with Romanticism...
...she recognizes the gesture as an acknowledgment of human vulnerability in an inhuman environment...
...The title of her new collection of poems, A Kiss in Space (Knopf, 184 pp., $22.00), is a reference to the joint docking of NASA's Atlantis with the Russian Mir space station, and the televised smooch exchanged by a male astronaut and female cosmonaut...
...At the same time, she describes a friend, a carpenter, who when not building writes poems for pure pleasure, the same way she made her house...
...Winter Hours begins with an essay on building a house...
...as if these rows of wheat had never been combed by plows...
...But this is not like chatting at a party...
...The French countryside, seen from the basket of a balloon, becomes less a series of hard-worked farms than an abstract pattern, suggesting that perspective alone can make the difference between life's hardships and the beauty of art: —as if none of them had ever toiled to till afield...
...If Salter is a Romantic in her return to song-like verse forms, Oliver evokes Romanticism's identification with nature, even to the obliteration of human individuality...
...and the joys of working with your hands...
...Salter is one of the outstanding poets to emerge in the last 20 years...
...But in the misogyny of Modernism, the remote Marianne Moore was the only poet of her sex to completely escape charges of triviality or hysteria...
...The sudden flash of genius that imagined a detective always able to make a deduction from a few clues is not, after all, so very different from the one that allowed Bell to harness sound waves, or the breakthrough that enabled Sullivan to teach her charge to recognize in a few drops of water on the hand the intellectual concept that led her to speech and a teeming world outside the prison of herself...
...She shows us bits and pieces of her own personality behind the persona of verse, yet tells us nothing about her companion, her vices or similar matters that often pass for knowledge in contemporary belles-lettres...
...A style made up of those elements, and some others, will not sound "conversational" by today's standards, this is a "writing" mode...
...The sight of scientists kissing in space moves her...
...The centerpiece here, "Alternating Currents," intercuts back and forth among three sets of relationships...
...At the time, women writers were prominently featured in anthologies...
...Certainly we are invited into the poet's train of thought to partake of her viewpoint, to see with her eyes...
...One activity is hardly a metaphor for the other, she makes clear...
...Similarly, during a happy family evening spent watching an old movie about the sinking of the Titanic, she and her husband tell their daughters that the director envisioned the ship as an old-fashioned symbol of society...
...as if the tangled necklaces of white-blossomed petits pois in their flungopen jewelry box of soil were conundrums we can leave unraveled...
...Trust her to remind us that the names of both space vehicles invoke Utopian dreams: Plato's mythical continent, supposedly lost beneath the seas, yet no more elusive than the "peace" that manages to keep evading the world's grasp...
...Capable of tossing off a whimsical villanelle about her spouse's passion for old movie actresses not to her taste, she is equally the mistress of subtle shifts of sound that increase the pleasure of absorbing her topic, whatever it is...
...Vincent Millay carved on the plinths of libraries alongside Aeschylus and Shakespeare...
...The third strand concerns the blind and deaf Helen Keller, taken to see Bell by her teacher, Annie Sullivan, so that he can help her feel the vibrations his inventions employ...
...it kept my body happy while I scribbled...
...In these essays the seasons are always turning in their cycle, and Oliver attunes herself to their moods...
...as if what really matters is our happiness above all...
...Presumably Oliver would counter that few of us are very revealing in social moments, where manners are on automatic pilot or we are try ing to impress the company...
...It is the complexity and thought-provoking quality of several sustained longer poems that distinguishes A Kiss in Space from Salter's three previous books...
...She knows how the unknown comers of the deceased get filled up with reconstructions other people dream up...
...That motion, hardly more than a dreamy sauntering, worked for me...
...As these stories keep intersecting one another, Salter is able to suggest something about the burden of inventions that can begin to supersede their creators, and also show how perception can help us imagine what we have never seen, thus enlarging our world...
...We like to be free to create something unexpected on occasion—something that is not part of the work we are known for...
...But this book marks a change for the author that she notes in her Introduction...
...Her new volume, Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (Houghton Mifflin, 109 pp., $22.00), contains sustained musings, primarily in essays on a variety of her favorite topics: the particularities of nature—especially around her home on outer Cape Cod, where the view is very much dominated by the Atlantic...
...One feels, though, that making conversation with Oliver might be a little bit like trying to talk to Emily Dickinson...
...Mary Oliver is an anomaly in a culture where so many writers aim to strip bare before their readers...
...The poetry of Mary Jo Salter and Mary Oliver, while quite different, is lyrical and distinctively feminine, though not self-consciously so...
...She has plenty of heart, though, to season her satiric appreciation of incongruities...
...The tang of Salter's themes is well matched by her witty and lilting facility with forms...
...The poet obviously intends Winter Hours to be associated with human aging...
...First comes Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone and a series of related devices involving sound waves, who has an assistant named Watson...
...Still, life does not confine us to one activity...
...One saw the names of Sara Teasdale, Elinor Wylie and Edna St...
...Fairly crackling with such mind-expanding perceptions, Salter's poems make a savory banquet for the imagination...
...Somehow, the quiet, self-contained assurance of Jane Austen coexists in her with the pithiness of Samuel Johnson, the luminescence of Percy Shelley, the exactness of John Muir's descriptive powers...
...I wanted to build, in the other way, with the teeth of the saw, and the explosions of the hammer, and the little shrieks of the screws winding down in their perfect nests...
...Nonetheless, Oliver's self-revelation continues to be discrete...
...her "heroes," who range from naturalists like the French entomologist, Jean Henri Fabre, to a number of fellow poets, including Poe, Whitman, Hopkins, and Frost...
...In recent decades, however, women have once more flourished across the landscape of verse...
...The self-sacrificing discipline of the first class passengers contrasts with the mad, everyman-for-himself scramble for survival in steerage...
...At most, we might think of it as conversational in the sense Coleridge intended in "This Lime Tree Bower, My Prison...
...For many years, Oliver says, she wrote poems as she walked...
...But once the children are in bed, the two adults face up to a darker metaphor that underlines the perilous nature of our security: Even now, an undetected leak may be about to turn our world upside down...
Vol. 82 • June 1999 • No. 7
