POETRY
159
personal identity. "I could make out a beggar," says Galway Kinnell,
"Down the long street he was calling
Galway!
/
I started towards him
and began calling
Galway!"
The explicit figure of the
Doppelganger
comes into the book just this once. But even without the dramatic in–
trusion his presence would be distinctly felt. The charm and force of
many of Kinnell's poems lies in his ability to watch himself do what he
does with a wise, untroubled stare. A mystical disposition suggests a vision
blurred. But Kinnell's eye is exact and exacting: a Bleecker Street wino
looks in upon the scene of a poetry reading from "the mowed cornfield
of his gawk"; on a summer morning the poet sees "the old crane / Who
holds out his drainpipe of a neck / And creaks along in the blue"; and
watches "Milton Norway's sky-blue Ford / Dragging its ass down the
dirt road / On the other side of the valley."
The quotient of "nature" poems in this volume is high, perhaps too
high. While many poems in this vein are as economical as line drawings,
a certain sameness of attitude dominates a run of them and threatens to
fix the poet in the dead stance of man-against-the-sky. In the city, on the
other hand, this man has things to say that are new. In "The River
That is East," a kind of postlude to
The Bridge,
he suggests in just five
packed stanzas what has happened, in less than thirty years, to the epical
pretensions of a visionary and, by implication, to the illusions of a culture.
A Laocoon-like involvement in the toils of creative anxiety, a rage
for freedom and identity, are the substance of the title poem of William
Jay Smith's collection. The poem is superb-at once a dispersion of forces
and a gathering of strength-and so far superior to anything else in the
book that it has the impact of a window smashed open. A poem about
itself, it begins with delicately quiet annotations, muted feelings, builds
in a controlled extravagance of whirlings and whorlings and agonized
self-recognitions, and arrives at a kind of epiphany. Wholly convincing,
without a false syllable in its hundreds of lines, it is a recreation of ex–
perience that seems to make its statement not by its calculations but by
its processes. To single out "The Tin Can" is not to slight Smith's
demonstrated talents, but to recognize a poem that comes from the depths
with the awesome wholeness of a thing urged into being.
Smith's range of subject and tone is notable-from pidgin English
wit to Vergilian benisons-and while his book is continually engaging it
is bewilderingly uneven. What is one to make, for instance, of the ex–
quisite efficiency of a poem like "Morels" side by side with the thumping
awfulness of "The Tempest"-in which a boatload of battered pilgrims
comes to an island off Virginia "Where safely, under more compliant
skies / They might chart out that voyage to a shore /
On
which with
confidence a nation would arise?" In his recently adopted long lines and
