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PARTISAN REVIEW
do not develop according to any fixed pattern. Line spills into line,
although never very casually. Since his statements are forceful, they
dance out, either awkwardly or gracefully, some specific moment of
awareness. All of Ignatow's poems try to be actions, eventful and mov–
ing, rather than editorials-which is how they sometimes end up when
the action is superseded by speculation on its results. Their subjects
are the blundering half-nightmares that trip the consciousness, that
clutter a wakeful and eager curiosity. In some sense the poems them–
selves become a way of cleaning house. One discovers a beautiful honesty
in such direct statements as "For All Friends": "Talking together, we
advance from loneliness/ to where words fall off into space/ and send
up no echo. Looking down/ for instruction, we gaze into the crease/
and fold of each othcr's face./ We are falling from the precipice of
heaven,! our flesh aged by life's upward force./Our words are buried
in the falling air) Deep in the ground, with time's impact,/ we will be
one with our words,/ for earth too falls toward eternity." Ignatow is a
more diversified poet than this would suggest. Invariably his poems
have an ethical core, and they try to get something stated by the way
they move. Ignatow writes mostly about the urban world-about sales–
men and clients, about fantasists running after buses, about house–
builders, museums and suicides, and about the shock of meeting oneself
in a room or in another person. "The Painter," a poem of forty lines,
and incidentally the longest in the book, is a finely sustained, indivisible
unit--one of the best I have read on the subject; which seems to prove
that the poet's form is really integral. He makes his poems of whatever
length say what they have to say; there is nothing arbitrary about them.
The Scottish poet W. S. Graham writes in much subtler and many
different forms but, like Ignatow, is trying to forge an identity and is
caught up by typical metaphysical questions in a post-Freudian context:
"When I fell down into this place/ My father drew his whole day's
pay,/ My mother lay in a set-in bed,! The midwife threw my bundle
away." "The Nightfishing," a long, remarkably fresh symbolic poem
in seven sections, has the ruminative melopoeic movement of
Four
Quartets.
It
is inventive and closely patterned. The poet joins a crew
of night-fishermen on a sea-trawler dragging for herring. The fishing
is exquisitely described; the poem moves closely with the fishermen's
sweeping rhythms and heaving efforts, and glows with the iridescence of
the sea, the boat, the fish. While immersed in the trawling the poet
describes his sense of the fishing as a spiritual hunt, a search for words;
arriving home at dawn, "Now he who takes my place continually anew/
Speaks me thoroughly perished into another./ And the quay opened its
