482
PARTISAN REVIEW
..IN
WHAT HOUR..
IN WHAT HOUR. By Kenneth Rexroth. Macmillan.
$1.75.
First hooks are usually made from pretended attitudes; Rexroth's
In W/UJt Hour
comes somewhat too late in his life for that. The sobriety,
the fatigue, the sense that a good deal has passed by and little has been
grasped, seem to belong to him peculiarly. There are a few poor attempts
at frivolity, mostly in the titles, hut the hook is naturally elegiac.
The setting of the poems, in the mountains of California, has much to
do with the tone. The self observes from a height, or at a distance. Usually
events are not known sharply as here and now hut merely as
up there
or
down there.
The sense of touch has been lost, and with it the world's edges
and details. A few different kinds of poems are contained in the hook;
their words bave in common an abstractness that makes for monotony;
and an almost obstinate repetition of sounds gives them a sort of character:
One hundred feet overhead the fog from the Pacific
Moves swiftly over the hills and houses of San Francisco.
After the bright March day the interior valleys
Suck great quantities of cool air in from the ocean.
It is a world not without color and movement, yet these have been general·
ised almost to the point of disappearance:
The skill of the kingfisher was never
More clear than now, nor the scream of the jay,
As the deer shifts her covert at a footfall;
Nor the butterfly tulip ever brighter
In the white spent wheat; nor the pain
Of a wasp stab ever an omen more sure.
The pain here seems more an omen than a pain.
If
the creatures happen
to make one think of Marianne Moore's poetry, the difference nevertheless
is obvious. In her poems, though whole objects may he static, and an array
is presented rather than a world, there is at least a permanent clarity or
iridescence in the parts. Rexroth usually leaves the reader with an inactive
diffuse remainder.
In some of these poems the sense of distance is temporal as well as
spatial. Their tense is the past, and some hear actual dates. The first part
of the hook, called
Lessons in Geography and History,
has an epigraph
from Whitehead: "The next chapter is concerned with the puzzling fact
that there is an actual course of events which is in itself a limited fact, in
that metaphysically speaking, it might have been otherwise." There is no
art without memory, but in Rexroth the attempt at remembrance of an
actual course of events obliterates the present:
For a month now, wandedng over the Sierras,
A poem had been gathering in my mind.. . .
Last night
I
remembered the date and it all
Began to grow together and take on purpose, etc.
