BOOKS
625
Lowell's collected verse is a difficult point. Here they stand as an
effort to
try
on voices of critical authority and power, just as many of
his earlier
Imitations
assumed the anguished voice of Baudelaire.
Lowell's verse is not very well served by the format of
Near the
Ocean.
Mixing poetry and drawings is always a tricky matter. In the
Juvenal translation Sidney Nolan's drawings are spaced so as to stall
and start the text in a totally arbitrary fashion and their style jars with
the savagery of the poem. Often the literalness of the drawings sent me
back to the verse glad that there are certain tasks only ordered words
can perform. (Human features superimposed on an anchor scarcely
complement the final lines of Lowell's tribute to Theodore Roethke: "she
made you nonexistent / the ocean's anchor, our high tide.") Most
irritating, the slick coffee-table design of the volume entirely misrepresents
the poems which, at their best, challenge things that are shiny and
bright. It is precisely not a volume of "collected poems" as
A.
D. Hope's
is. Its level is uneven, not as consistently 'high as Lowell's last book,
For
the Union Dead.
But, like the splendid title poem of that previous
volume, its asks difficult questions about individual feelings and public
brutality. The poems are tentative and urgent, canny about public mo–
tives and one's ways of deceiving oneself. It is hardly surprising that he
should have been attracted - in envy as well as fellow feeling - to the
Roman satirists, whose critical tempers still permitted glimpses of heroic
resolve.
David Kalstone
