BOO KS
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(as in some of the war poems, the one about the conscientious-objector
conscript, the one about the Yale boy marching off to war, and "My
sweet old etcetera") as an angry and tender clown. Angry and tender
clowning begins to pivot over to lyricism in some of the poems about
whores: what begin as half-mockery,
should
i
entirely ask of god why
on the alert neck of this brittle whore
delicately wobbles an improbably distinct face,
end with intense sinister and pathetic dramatization,
or why her tiniest whispered invitation
is like a clock striking in a dark house.
The anger is never purged from even the most purely lyrical poems:
with their recurrent theme that love, love is the only real thing and
damn-damn and hate and torture-any evidence to the contrary. The
finest explicit statement of this is the long, very beautiful poem
be–
ginning,
my father moved through dooms of love,
and ending magnificently, in a noble, almost "metaphysical" paradox:
and nothing quite so least as truth
-i
say though hate were why men breathe–
because my father lived his soul
love is the whole and more than all
The later lyricism is gentler, the "real world"-so, crudely and inade–
quately in both directions to call it-held more safely at a distance:
o by the by
has anybody seen
little you-i
who stood on a green
hill and threw
his wish at blue .
..
So what shall one say, on the whole? There is some of the matter
of life here; there is an extraordinary technical dexterity; there is an
unurbane wit of a very savagely effective sort; a disturbing gift for
evoking sexual situations below head-level; one of the most notable tal–
ents for direct and simple lyrical utterance of this century: and, over
and above all these, there is something which, however narrow and cal-
