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GEOFFREY H. HARTMAN
productive of "otherness": Seidel turns the genre of the monologue
against itself by stifling his characters in their own thoughts. In "The
Heart Attack," for instance, a man dies during a dream in which his
dead mistress harangues him, and as he dies the dream triumphantly
describes his return to its womb. There are many other envelopments
of this kind, but "The Heart Attack" is especially skillful because it
identifies, fatally, dream and woman. No wonder, therefore, that Seidel's
images of freedom move us with unexpected power, as at the end of
the following poem:
Plaintiff is awarded the Judge! Passerine,
Perched on branch and vine,
Plaintiff spreads its smallish wings–
Brownish white, whitish brown-and sings.
("A Negro Judge")
. The artistic implications of
Final Solutions
are, on the whole, less
important than the existential ones. This is a first book with many flaws:
of economy, of gratuitous associations, of point of view splintered or
not sustained, and of indulgence in stray personal allusions. (I fail to
see the necessity of some of the Hadrianic references, or why in "The
Walk There" an adulterer becomes a connoisseur of VergiI.)
It
is, in
fact, several books in one and with poems so condensed that they are
often self-defeating. Yet against these flaws I must set one absolute
sign of literary talent: not only occasional successes like the portrait of
"The Coalman" (still inspired perhaps by Lowell) but an omnipresent
energy of words and observations. Seidel makes us taste the "thousand
bitters" which characterize a mind beyond the clarity of innocence and
struggling toward the clarity of maturity.
Except for a few silly poems, which I shall consider as padding
and ignore, Mr. Dugan's second book, following closely on his first,
shares its distinction.
It
is perhaps less a second book than a second
installment. Not many of the poems are innovative or profound, but
they are almost everything else: clear, sustained, witty, and self-delight–
ing. The economy of their style is often remarkable. It is not the dense
economy of the metaphorical poet, however. For spareness is continually
relieved by impromptu, leisure, and whimsy:
the rigged-up lights
of the Palisades Am1.lSement Park
promise a west of pleasure, open space,
and a circus of whippable lions,
