140
PARTISAN REVIEW
But one must conclude that the best poetry in
The Dark Houses
is what one misses from its characteristic pieces. "Springdale must go"
screamed Harold Rosenberg of the small town in these pages last fall,
and perhaps that is all there is to be said on the subject. One can
only hope that the attempt to deal with it in Mr. Hall's current book
represents a short blind alley jutting out from the course of a long
and distinguished body of work.
May Swenson appears to have done less winnowing in preparing
her second volume,
A Cage of Spines,
than have either of the above–
mentioned poets. Her collection is both larger and more variously in–
clusive than the others, and while she has allowed a number of real
trifles to find their way into a company by no means trifling and
often profoundly impressive, her marked personal manner ranging over
a wide field of possibilities seems to justify a good deal of wandering.
For it is a manner of looking at things, rather than the commitment
to a specific style that characterizes Miss Swenson's kind of poem;
her subjects are largely scraps of mundane experience somehow made
at once personal and mythic. Opening an egg at breakfast time, the
metamorphosing of a moth, sightseeing at the Statue of Liberty, all
become
~ry
important matters in a slightly weird scheme of things
which we have no hesitancy, finally, in accepting. The beginning of
her opening poem, for example, turns an unwonted but not uncommon
catastrophe into a manifestation of a more universal natural history:
The hammer struck my nail, instead of nail.
A moon flinched into being. Omen-black
it began its trail. Risen from horizon
on my thumb (no longer numb and indigo)
it waxed yellow, waned to a sliver that now
sets white, here at the rim I cut tonight.
I make it disappear, but mark its voyage
over my little oval ceiling that again
is cloudless, pink and clear
. . .
But even here, the diction seems to be surviving the fretted, quirky
versification, and in some of the poems that aIle less successful in their
entirety than "Almanac," the question arises as to whether the particular
insight isn't often more powerful and compelling than the poem itself.
Miss Swenson's obvious fond11less in this volume for the riddles and
intricate kennings of early Germanic poetry is often put to its most
effective uses not in the more schematic applications of "Seven Natural
