BOO KS
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arms. I heard the seal Close on him gently swinging on oiled hinges.
Moored here, we cut the motor quiet. He that/ I'm not lies down.
Men shout. Words break. I ami My fruitful share." The details of the
fishing are more disarming than some of the metaphysics, but the poem
is impressive nevertheless, and stays with one. Graham has a lyrical
sense which creates surprising effects out of different levels of diction
and verbal textures: "The Clyde sleeved in its firth/ Reached and
dazzled me) I moved and caught the sweet/ Courtesy of your mouth./
My breath to your breath./ And as you lay fondly / In the crushed smell
of the moor/ The courageous and just sun/ Opened its door."
Of the three somewhat younger poets, Louis Simpson's work shows
the most character and sensibility, Donald Hall's the lightest weight,
and Louis Coxe's the greatest moralism. They all stick close to tradi–
tional meters and shape their idioms according to the familiar patterns
of Yeats, Robinson, or Auden. In Simpson poetic intelligence and the
shape of the poem go together. He has discrimination-a good sense of
relevance, a credible seriousness. His poems about women, about the
war, and about classical or mythological figures are too well made to be
embarrassing. Their themes suit a central preoccupation which, if not
yet independently resolved by the poet, is seldom cliched or dulled by
his having handled them. "John the Baptist," one of his longer poems,
has concision and considerable driving power, even a kind of fierce
beauty. No tired ironies get in the way, as they do in some of his other
poems struggling with affirmations. The poem accurately recreates an
integral experience.
Coxe and Hall are much more uneasy in their traditional gait.
They continually overplay their subjects-Coxe, by melodramatics, Hall,
by a measured sort of schoolboyish banter and a fretful concern for
good manners. Coxe's world has been trampled on and bruised hard;
Hall's is hopeful of being trampled on, so that he is more given to
making it look brave and capable of intermittent bravuras. The form
of these poets is on constant exhibition, as if up for inspection, like
well-oiled rifles and R.O.T.C. uniforms on the parade grounds. Both
indulge an appetite for ancestoring around the New England landscape,
hunting behind barn doors and old clapboards for lost childhoods, girls,
families, Thanksgiving dinners. We have been there before and know
the wind's grim reminder through the trees: "Sure, the going is hard–
even harder than you think; so grow up, sonny-if you can." Of course,
Hall's and Coxe's addiction to mechanical form, their celebration of
the proprieties of family life, their mannerliness and conscience, are all
ways of ordering or salvaging a part of the world from the sense of loss
