470
G. S.
FRASER
it can liberate the imagination a little from a noisy, vulgar, constricting,
explosive present:
NOTE TO WANG WEI
How could you be so happy, now some thousand years
disheveled, puffs of dust?
It leaves me uneasy at last,
Your poems tease me to the verge of tears
and your fate. It makes me think.
It makes me long for mountains
&
blue waters.
Makes me wonder how much to allow.
(I'm reconfirming, God of bolts
&
bangs,
Of fugues
&
bucks, whose rocket burns
&
sings.)
I wish we could meet for a drink
in a "freedom from ten thousand matters."
Be dust myself pretty soon; not now.
The good hard-won colloquial ease of that late Berryman style can risk
grazing the sentimental,
Your poems tease me to the verge of tears,
and can risk using a cliche with the double irony of not sneering at the
cliche but using it flatly as it is usually used:
"It makes me think."
This
extreme ease comes from the casual strengths of American spoken
speech, arrived at in Berryman after a long apprenticeship in other
people's styles: as in this variation on Yeats's heart-and-head theme and
on the topics of Yeats's "The Circus Animals' Desertion":
-You are an animal trainer, Heart replied.
Without your animals leaping at your side
No sun will save you, nor this bloodless pride.
-What must I do then? Must I stay and work
With animals, and confront the night, in the circus?
-You learn from animals. You learn in the dark.
I at first thought it better not to quote from Miss Garrigue who is
a poet in a very broad sense in a Whitrnanesque tradition, but perhaps
it would be better to say that she has a kind of fluency and abundance
which one associates with certain kinds of woman poet, Edith Sitwell
or the Comtesse de Noailles. There is splendidly much of her and of
her lavish apprehension of seasons and passions but one usually needs
a lot of it on the page, too essentially fluid to be detachable in
chunks. But I was wrong. Here is a poem in which the abundance is
condensed. No poet for dyspeptics, though, or compulsive rejectors:
