BOOKS
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Noss is discipline incarnate, building up with little poetic byplay a
maximum of quiet conviction, in these original poems which read
like expert translations of a perceptive Japanese poet, one with less
pathos than usual but much engaging presentment. (After three years
at West Point and three as an officer in Okinawa and Japan, Mr. Noss
had the imagination to study with Lowell at Iowa and Shapiro at
Johns Hopkins.)
Scribner's notion of clapping three dissimilar poets together under
one hat, however embarrassing to the reviewer, is probably a good idea
if the poets agreed to it. Miss Swenson is a scholiast of the experimental.
Her poems make all kinds of patterns on the page, go in heavily for
imitative action, are active to the verge of apoplexy. Every line bristles
with determination to
do something
about poetry, to hoist it off its
stodgy rump. Some, indeed, are wonderfully and fearfully basic. But
the net effect, I'm afraid, is glassy. Alongside Miss Swenson's kinaesthesia,
Mr. Duncan's "own" poems snore comfortably and learnedly away in
their iambic torpor. His best work is translation of some of Dante's
less well known canzoni, some Rilke, Baudelaire and Apollinaire, and
it is very good indeed, in the very best, self-effacing, craftsmanlike style
of what promises to be a distinguished age of translation. He is equally
adept in the jazz idiom of Apollinaire and the grave intricacy of the
Dante.
In W. S. Merwin's second volume we reach what is probably an
apogee of the nonexplosive ideal. Some of these poems achieve a fine
ecstasy of attenuation, dreamily fingering a great array of Yeatsian prop–
erties and discarding them before they have a chance to solidify. Much
of it is Yeats dipped in a strong bleaching solution of late Stevens; the
bloody symbols of the Aesthetic Movement decently veiled in gauze. Mr.
Merwin has developed a unique kind of metaphorical modesty. I don't
think that with the best will one can help being irritated by this extreme
rarefaction, if one attempts to read the book through at one sitting;
ingenuousness can become a drug on the market, particularly today.
But Merwin has all the virtue of ingenuousness and something more;
a true and delicate (though so far self-indulgent) ear, and a versa–
tile musicality. He is nearly always engaging even
if
he doesn't yet
leave much deposit in the mind. "Runes For a Round Table," "When
I Came From Colchis," "Proteus" and the third "Canso" are superior
poems, successful new departures that still blink a little in the clear
new light of coherence.
Anthony Hecht belongs to the courtly tradition, and is our latest
and happiest answer to Baudelaire's libel that "The protestant countries
