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JOHN HOLLANDER
youth, from certainty, perhaps ("And the only wrong
in
all my
song / Was the view that I knew what was true," he sings in
"The Foggy, Foggy Blue"). The idea of poetic ripening (late
Shakespeare, late Henry James, vegetative imagery, relaxations
of meter and syntax-many such impulses stand hovering about
these new poems) seems to have replaced, or rather, engulfed,
all others: history, irony, society, the concerns of the city poet,
hardly exist at all here. Sometimes we get glimpses of former
subjects in an occasional image or fragment of a scene ("And I
thought I heard the fresh scraping of the flying steel of boys on
roller skates / Rollicking over the asphalt in 1926" or "In the
ultimate box-seat and balcony of the blue" or "Eva and Sinbad,
dead these seven years.") But the emphasis is always on the
absorption of the old experiences by the new, rather than the
creative reliving of the memories.
Technically, these new poems are quite remarkable. They
are not really written in lines in the sense that the earlier poems
are; the long lines and verse paragraphs stem not so much from
Whitman or from psalmody via Christopher Smart as from the
impulse to produce incantations and spells. At its most success–
ful, there is a hypnotic quality about the music of this new poetry,
resulting from the manipulation of faintly-heard interior rhymes,
syntactical parallels and morphological patterns. Poetry, in one
of the poems is invoked as
The reality of the imagination
The throat of exaltation,
The procession of possession,
The motion .of meaning and
The meaning of morning and
The mastery of meaning.
But even as when, here, the lines are short, they tend not to be
memorable. It is even hard to pick out whole poems: so many of
them seem
to
fuse into one another, to gloss and amplify each
other. But I should say that "Seurat's Sunday Afternoon along
the Seine," a magnificent piece about
La Grande Jatte,
the three
sections of "Narcissus," "Once and for All" and a few others are
