BOOKS
141
Songs," but rather throughout the book in the
freq~nt
animations
of lifeless objects or bodying-forth of observations into feelings. "An
Extremity" is a loving and sustained set of five-finger exercises, in
this case, fantasies about the poet's hand "Roused from napping in
my lap"; it proceeds brilliantly to its conclusion, in the penultimate
line, but
In
the very last one something almost spurious appears to
happen:
Left one looked at right one writes
Star Harp Beast Family of Five
Map laid live in my lap
Clapped together the two arrive are stated
the poem made extremeties mated
Here, the attempt made to round off the poem is less successful
than those made throughout its course to kleep it going. The patent
reference to the verbal world so well avoided in the consideration
of
the hand itself is almost forced and obtrusive; perhaps it is for
some of this same reason that the
calligrammes
and typographical
frivolities of many of the poems give the impression of getting in the
way of Miss Swenson herself. For Miss Swenson herself is often
spectacular and original in her most spontaneous responses to the
world, her own person or even what she has just said ("The summer
that I was ten-/ Can it be there was only one / summer that I was
ten? It must / have been a long one then").
It
is just that the conceit,
rather than the poem, ends up all too often as her ultimate and most
effective unit of expression.
Of all these second books, Donald Hall's seems to be most conscious
of itself as helping to shape an eventual corpus; and while such a kind
of literary self>-consciousness can often prove unfortunate, its absence
can make itself shown in the relatiVie modesty of David Wagoner's
attention to the crafting of each poem, (rather than, ultimately, to
the meaning of a total personal statement), or in May Swenson's almost
commonplace book-like assembly of the records of experience (whereas
Marianne Moore and even more so, Elizabeth Bishop, both contrive
often to make an individual poem do the work of a volume, for ex–
ample). Perhaps the basis for the most important distinction here lies
in what each poet considers a poem to be. For Mr. Hall much more
than for either of the others, a poem is less an artifact (questions of
technique and "care" notwithstanding) than a kind of statement for
which he wishfs to be peculiarly responsible-with that kind of
responsibility, perhaps, invoked in a deadpan way by Frank O'Hara,
