158
JOHN MALCOLM BRINNIN
there occur episodes of family drama in which real people play familiar
roles, conversing like anybody's father, mother, children, and yet in which
something subtly grotesque is happening right before our eyes, something
that fixes the domestic dramatis personae just a few crucial millimetres
away from "reality." These figures
en tableau
remind one of those Ger–
man postcards on which large cats, dressed like characters out of
Bud–
denbrooks,
act out "Sunday at Grandma's" or "The Christening of the
Firstborn." In Jarrell's versions they look as cuddly as their
kitsch
counterparts, they say things just as cute as those recorded in the balloons
of speech that issue from their mouths, but they are involved in circum–
stances that have been of urgent concern to Sophocles and to Sigmund
Freud.
This last, almost posthumous book, is full of utterly fresh observa–
tions, knifing wit and a pervasive tenderness. What the book perhaps lacks
is verbal density, even verbal grace- an
ampleur
of language com–
mesurate with its insights. Many of the poems are rich in surprise, and
many of them give the illusion of a mind spontaneously working in shifts
and turns. At the same time, many of them seem to conclude drily,
logically, with an invisible Q .E.D. The poetic situations Jarrell records
or devises are as distinctive as trademarks; what is often curiously miss–
ing is the sound of his voice.
In this grouping of poets Kinnell is the quiet one- deft, meditative,
scrutinizing correspondences, hearkening to intimations. Like Jarrell, he
is conscious of the penumbra of a "second" reality; but in his case the
missing dimension is not a mythical projection but an impenetrable other–
ness. "I know I live half alive in the world," he says. "I know half my
life belongs to the wild darkness." This is bold, and naive, but Kinnell
means what he says:
Sometimes 1 see them,
The south-going Canada geese,
At evening, coming down
In pink light, over the pond,
In
great,
Loose, always dissolving V's-
1 go out into the field,
Amazed and moved, and listen
To the cold, lonely yelping
Of those tranced bodies in the sky,
Until 1 feel on the point
Of breaking into a sacred, bloodier speech.
The "wild darkness" sends out its emissaries, but most often nature is an
unresponsive wall against revelation, a wall that won't give, a weeping
wall. This immediate sense of the physical-cum-metaphysical extends to
