BOO KS
293
Review.
New Hampshire-born myself and bookishly trained to botanize,
anatomize and ironize over nature, I am struck dumb by Dickey's deep–
Dixie spiritual approach, which becomes more exotic with each new
poet from those regions. He is even stranger than Randall Jarrell.
Nevertheless there is inscape here as well as landscape. "In the
Lupanar at Pompeii" has a Leopardian splendor of conception; "The
Hospital Window" is as good a new poem about dying as you will read
this year; "The Owl King" is a charmingly solemn and touchingly grave
woodland fantasy. In the long, ambitious, Thomas-like "Dover: Believ–
ing in Kings," Dickey's conversational iambic ground-tone, which can
be monotonous or transparent according to whether he has anything
or not to say, deepens to a fairly rugged and, at the close, powerful in–
cantation, in which the visual, adjectival excitement, the swoop of
mind through history and the gull-loud Dover landscape, mounts with
a mounting sense of the occasion.
It
may lean too heavily on Thomas,
but Thomas
is
still one of Dickey's liberating dead.
To have Francis Fergusson's poems together for the first time is an
unclouded and long overdue pleasure. To move in Fergusson's universe
of sheer, exact, humane and opulent emotions, his cold-eyed
espagnolisme
alternating with a Dantean eye for the
semina motu-um,
the first things
of love, death, family feeling, urban existence, his sure molding of a
simple phrase and a noble stanza, is to be back in that pentecostal age
of modem poetry when the life of the language lay for a while so near
the surface that problems of form seemed to solve themselves with
miraculous ease. To be a bit sentimental about the twenties is an over–
flow of mere candor when one reads Fergusson and realizes how that
atmosphere shaped and sustained yet another large-minded poet whose
most recent long poem, "On the Turning Earth," an elegy for his wife,
printed here for the first time, is the equal of anything he has written
before.
A parallel with John Peale Bishop may come closest: the debt to
Eliot and the French ironists, the steep sense of honor, surgical eye for
sentimentality and clinical pity for blunderers. Fergusson is gentler,
though, than Eliot or Bishop, both in choice of theme and technical
ambition. "On the Turning Earth" for his wife, and "A Suite for
Winter" on the suicide of the son of two middle-aged friends, have a
dark, even-spirited gravity all their own, as well as a precision of lang–
uage that becomes, in Fergusson's hands, itself a first principle of form,
which even inspires relief that nothing more intricately musical was
attempted to cloud one's pleasure in Fergusson's mastery of a few very
