Three Perennials in Bloom

...Deborah Digges finds her material in life's obstacles...

...In sum, this poet outfits us for the road we all must travel...

...Emotional devastation and its potential to ruin lives is another of Digges' themes...

...Her two prose memoirs describe her troubled adolescence and the travails her family worked through when one of her sons became extremely rebellious...

...Digges suggests in several poems that Persephone's hardest task must have been the journey between the sunlit world and the dark below—she must often have wished to stay in one place or the other, breaking the cycle of the seasons...

...The theme of The House of the Seven Gables, she finds, is "the sweetness of moral order, and the sourness—the terrible and prolonged bitterness—of its lack...

...Rita is Christopher's version of the creative artist doomed to what James Joyce termed "silence, exile and cunning...

...The surprise can be breathtaking...

...Then, after the death, survivors swing between acceptance of loss and the inability to believe the deceased are no longer present in the next room...

...Long Life: Essays and Other Writings (Da Capo, 101 pp., $22.00) is the latest offering by the prolific Mary Oliver...

...Shopping with the Muses" imagines the artifacts and costumes of literature: "Sappho's tiara, the many, many broken lyres,/a garbage heap of cell doors off their hinges, curtains rent, at last, on all the sonnets...

...Caring for a beloved person who is dying can be an emotional high-wire walk: Good days and remissions bring surges of hope...

...That is the cause of winter...

...The fictional characters of Franklin Flyer (2002) rub elbows with Josephine Baker, Rita Hayworth and Wild Bill Donovan, founder of the OSS...

...Elsewhere she sees this persistence in humans too, observing, "If the body is a temple, surely one's garden is like a mind,/half-seeded by the wind, ready to slip into its own peculiar madness...

...Emerson's trick—I use the word in no belittling sense—was to fill his essays with 'things' at the same time that his subject was conceptual, invisible...

...The poem is a lament for Marina Tsvetaeva, whose grief drove her to suicide...

...Another vignette based on history, "Walt Whitman at the Reburial ofPoe," muses on "our first detective of the broken heart...

...Smart did write a radiant mystical poem about his feline companion (which influenced Allen Ginsberg's Howl), and Christopher affectingly conjures the misery of confinement and the burden of insanity...

...The mole will stay put, too near the poet's house, risking capture again by another animal, perhaps the same cat...

...In "Boston," we glimpse her in a hard-drinking pose: Rita sprawls out, naked cool legs On the coffee table, a scratchy Ravel On the phonograph and vodka spilled Down her breast...

...they find consolation in everyday routines and the companionship of an animal...

...His debut collection, On Tour with Rita (1982), features a series of verbal postcards chronicling the brief sojurns of the title character, another femme fatale, in various locales...

...Who can tell at this hour seabirds from starlings, wind from revolving doors or currents off the river...

...Two of the Lost Five Foolish Virgins" alludes to the Gospel parable of the bride's attendants who went to buy oil for their lamps but returned too late for the wedding feast...

...In a similar vein "Jeoffrey the Cat" is a monologue in the voice of the mad 18th-century poet Christopher Smart observing his pet in his cell at the asylum...

...Moreover, it is no simple matter to be both inspirational and moderate...

...The sequence "1972," from Atomic Fields (2000), evokes a bizarre nightclub "in a labyrinth of tunnels," like a Max Ernst collage...

...O, the dying are such acrobats...

...It was the dog that kept her going back...

...Ultimately, the Provincetown real estate boom led to the construction of a new sewage plant on that spot...

...The book also contains Introductions from collections of Emerson and Hawthorne, and a scattering of poems that Oliver tells us to think of "as little alleluias...

...She tries on hats, "Pope Gregory's, St...

...Here you must take a boat from one day to the next, or clutch the girders of the bridge, hand over hand...

...her annual return ushers in spring...

...Skylines provoke Nicholas Christopher in the same manner the oceans and eelgrass of her environs inspire Mary Oliver...

...This book's title alludes to the old rite of passage on ships that was the baptism of a weathered voyager...

...The healthy have a responsibility not to treat the sick as if they have already slipped into the past...

...See how the dark takes the city in its arms and carries it into what yesterday we called the future...

...Many of the novel's improbable incidents actually took place...

...Long Life is anchored by a triptych of essays on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the latter's novel, The House of the Seven Gables...

...A visit to the Egyptian gallery at the Louvre that precedes her appearance, and the other psychics, the ghosts and the jade goddess who supplant her, all impart an air of the uncanny to these snapshots of Paris...

...The poet could be describing an early 1970s psychedelic rock album cover...

...Though the snapshots of cityscapes and Hollywood sets that crop up repeatedly in Christopher's poems may seem simplistic, cumulatively they form a disquieting commentary on contemporary America...

...Digges looks with compassion, too, at small creatures who strive through adversity: a snapping turtle crossing a busy patch of highway, a mole rescued from the mouth of her cat...

...Hitch your wagon to a star,' he advised...

...Like many women writers before her, Digges locates grief and the movement toward recovery in the myth of Persephone, who was kidnapped by the god of the underworld while gathering flowers...

...In Trapeze, she chronicles the sickness and death of her husband, as well as her own mourning and adjustment...

...Occasionally this is made explicit, as in the section of" 1962" that deals with the fear aroused by the Cuban Missile Crisis as seen through the eyes of a 10-year-old boy...

...But because she had eaten a few pomegranate seeds while captive in Hades, her kidnapper could command her to return to him every six months...

...The discursive "Wordsworth's Mountain" relates an incident in the poet's life when a stunning landscape seemed to shake him out of complacency and terrify him with a sense of the uncanny...

...Deborah Digges, who has two memoirs plus three previous volumes of verse to her credit, now makes it four with Trapeze (Knopf, 46 pp., $23.00...

...The title work finds her seeking a sense of equilibrium...

...The drop is a small ocean.' 'We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them.'" Oliver's love of 19th-century writers colors her own prose with some archaic mannerisms: the use of "man" as a generic, sentences starting with "behold" or "how wonderful...

...Like Hawthorne, Oliver believes passionately in living the "examined life," and her work conveys its lessons...

...Oliver has never been more transparent about her purpose: "It is the relationship of my own mind to landscape, to the physical world—especially to that part of it with which, over the years, I have...

...The gleam and the tranquility of the natural world he loved always," she writes, "and now he honored also the world's brawn and mystery, its machinations that lie beyond our understanding—that are not even nameable...

...But they are sailing like a pendulum between eternity and evening diving, recovering, balancing the air...

...In "Trillium" the poet humorously supposes that Persephone's affection for Cerberus— the fearsome three-headed hound who guards the realm of shades—helped her accept the pattern...

...How ever bad it was, she must have loved the dog, their walks by the river...

...Augustine's, Josephus'," and "Dante's boots" (presumably useful for metaphysical journeys), before choosing a gown from the Greek chorus because "it might just be the thing to wear to my last marriage...

...On Poete Three Perennials in Bloom By Phoebe Pettingell Tracking the journey of a poet whose work has engaged me from the outset affords a particular pleasure—and this spring finds three such seasoned travelers arriving at their latest ports of call...

...She sets a handful of disparate objects before the reader as if they were the contents of a walker's pocket dumped carelessly on a table: some multicolored pebbles mixed with a leaf or two, a crumpled grocery list, a fragment of sea glass...

...Waste Land: An Elegy," describes the vanishing of an old "burn dump," a relic from the days when garbage was legally incinerated...

...It is entirely convincing that Whitman would mourn Poe's sordid demise in another half-forgotten city, wearing another man's rags— a scene he might have written: streets snaking around him, steaming and sulphurous, rain dirty as it left the sky— one last maze before the foothills of hell...

...An inheritor of their forms and concerns, she blends observation of landscape with ethical meditation...

...Patterns that seem fortuitously artistic yet entirely natural rise from the oddments...

...Her thoughts sometimes appear to meander, until she arrives at a destination previously concealed from the reader...

...As readers of his novels know, Christopher is intrigued by history...

...Her rambles are seldom to exotic locales...

...The father of the American grotesque would seem to have little in common with the author of Leaves of Grass, but Christopher intuits that the latter's expansive imagination embraced everything human...

...In the process of viewing, she picks up the echoes of her surroundings: "The tide going out sounds harsher than the voice of its rising, what seems like a disinclination to leave growls in it, with the sound of dark, thick-stringed instruments...

...He has a predilection for long sequences that cut from scene to scene in cinematic fashion...

...Mary Oliver declares in her Foreword that "the prose horse is in harness, a good, sturdy and comfortable harness, while the horse ofpoetry has wings...

...The gods decreed that Persephone be released...

...Some are as children on swings pumping higher and higher...

...Nevertheless, she lays shining furrows with her essays...

...Her eye spots the singularity and interconnection of each individual object, place or moment...

...So he attached the common word to the startling idea...

...She is tough but vulnerable, superstitious, alone even in company...

...Christopher's verse frequently embarks on various peregrinations reminiscent of "the Wanderer" in German lieder who lives on the road and never settles down...

...Like all such areas, this one had accumulated rusting stoves and cracked tires breeding mosquitoes...

...These touches betray how thoroughly she has been molded by the American Transcendentalists...

...Long Life collects recent occasional pieces: meditations on habits, dogs, and surprises emerging from familiar scenes, including Cape Cod Bay—"no more than a blue comma on the map of the world but, to me, the emblem of everything...

...physical decline plunges watchers into despair...

...become intimate...

...In a few instances, Christopher steers toward the surreal...

...Section 9 of his "14 rue Serpentine: a Paris Notebook" introduces an archetypal femme fatale: The snake charmer's daughter bom in a carnival tent with a crescent of stars on her brow has opened a storefront studio next door The Serpentine Priestess she calls herself bracelets jangling while she arranges tarot cards on a zodiac wheel explaining that the street was named not for its windingness but for the snakes Napoleon's soldiers brought back from Egypt which infest the neighborhood though you yourself have only seen one: the cobra coiled in a basket at her feet This character subsequently vanishes from the poem...

...They are single-minded in their determination to go about their business, regardless of perils and predators...

...And I would rather fly than plow...

...The seedy cities, lurking tough guys and slithering vamps in much of Nicholas Christopher's verse are reminiscent of the old film noir movies he discussed in his 1997 nonfiction study Somewhere in theNight: FilmNoir & the American City...

...Her mother, Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, fell into mourning so that nothing on earth could grow...

...Ever an observer of natural minutiae, she becomes, at times, a homespun philosopher in the tradition of Thoreau...

...Oliver's higher aim is to document the ways we overlook and ignore "waste"—in our lives and in nature, the human waste produced by certain lifestyles, and the fact that a waste land can foster fertility, even beauty...

...she prefers her regular morning strolls along the seashore in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where the tide brings new things every day...

...In Emerson, Oliver finds many ideas she shares: "Writing that loses its elegance loses its significance...

...Its acts include a one-armed clown who plays the violin, a stripper with three breasts, a pair of talking dogs that converse in Chinese, and—the finale—an androgynous couple done up as mermaid and merman who copulate itnderwater in a glass tank...

...At the bar, under green lights, a line of men in identical green suits stare into martini glasses that widen every hour, like whirlpools The waitresses, like Indian goddesses, have many arms "and some of them have wings...

...Oliver recognizes this as a psychological turning point, when Wordsworth was transformed from a mere enthusiast into an artist capable of portraying the sublime...

...This proves only partly correct...

...It should be stressed, though, that on balance Digges faces the world with amusement...

...Halfway through, the reader senses that the essay is veering toward an ecology lesson...

...This is the way many people go on living after bereavement...

...Yet its undergrowth provided a habitat for birds, wild flowers, snakes, turtles and foxes Oliver marveled at—a miniature wilderness in the midst of civilization...

...See, they leave scuff marks like jet trails on the sky...

...Through the Window of the Ail-Night Restaurant" creates a bleak, Dennis Hopperesque landscape at a bus stop where the passengers disembark like sleepwalkers...

...The turtle will repeatedly scramble out of the pond to try the road once more...

...Don't call them back, don't call them in for supper...

...In Crossing the Equator he offers selections from his seven previous volumes of verse, as well as some new poems...

...Nicholas Christopher, author of seven collections of poems, three novels and a book about film, has put together Crossing the Equator: New and Selected Poems 1972-2004 (Harcourt, 224 pp., $24.00...

...All of Christopher's work evokes the anxieties of urban life: the exaltation and apprehension skyscrapers arouse, the solitude of standing in a crowd of a thousand strangers, the nostalgia summoned by certain neighborhoods...