468
G. S.
FRASER
Creeley!" before making the effort to get through the manner to the
substance of the poem. It has been part of Alan Dugan's strength as
a poet to aim at a brutal directness, dispensing with all manners (even
the antipoetic manner, even the antistyle style). Yet though desperation
js the substance of Dugan's poetry, one can perhaps sense in this third
volume a new kind of desperation, that about writing a poem at all:
one feels sometimes, "This is an exercise, in disappointing stale and
bored expectations." One could use these volumes, in fact, for a sermon
on our culture, the continuing and rapid hunger with which it falsifies
responses, erects modes in order to cancel them, and contrast a mode
like the Augustan where over a century Pope, Goldsmith and Crabbe,
say, are having a real conversation with each other. One wants, how–
ever, to do justice to the poetry, timelessly, if that is still a possible con–
cept : and to see the poems as living,
if
they are still living, not as just
ready to be docketed in the newest glass case in the great contemporary
culture museum. To quote briefly, to make brief remarks, is perhaps
the only fair way of setting about this task.
Constantine Trypanis' long poem is given a lavish advantage to
the eye by the beautiful rare cutting of Arrighi italic in which it is
set, and it has been given an advantage to my ear by hearing him read
it aloud to me in his equally beautiful voice. The mode is one of piety
and retrospection, a mode like that of Eliot's
Ash W ednesday
with a less
intense agony and ardour:
- Lady of Many Favours, protect
those flowers of glass
flowers and angels af glass
guardians of your image on the altar.
The central image is of a culture preserved brittley in glass,
glass flowers no fingers ever reach. The eyes
of an imprisoned child still stare out of those windows,
a glass Adonis watching a glass spring.
The poem evokes a culture not dying and rotting to give birth to new
life
(si le grain ne meurt),
but preserved in glass images, that gather
dust, with a sterile pathos.
If
the diction seems both pure and dead, this
is appropriate to the theme; appropriate also that the beautiful type
and . setting seems to make the poem an object to be looked at, clear,
exact and brittle, rather than a gesture reaching out to us. But Trypanis
does not in the end want his memories to be gorgonized even in glass:
Adonis, glass Adonis, gnaw lilo,l} a trapped red fox
your own clenched bone to fly the spring that snapped.
