BOOKS
311
unfamiliar to her own experience, and which she need not invest with
the accounterments of melodrama or terror in order to make them
striking. The poems are often extrerr.ely lean, several cultivating a
stenographic bluntness which owes more to Alan Dugan than to any
of the woman poets I can think of. In fact, the more one thinks about
the resemblance, the more one can identify Dugan as a presence behind
these poems, especially in the many combinations of slang words and
elaborate Latinisms, as in "Saturnalia": "Now northward some two-bit /
vercingetorix sharpens his will. A star / Is born. Caesar snores on his
perch above the Senate."
What informs Dugan's verse, though, is a moral passion, an earnest–
ness which is largely lacking in Miss Gluck's volume. Instead of moral
passion we too often get melodrama, the forcing of images to yield
more than they can or ought to yield. Situations are unambiguously
awful; mothers become prototypical predators, husbands monomaniacal
in their dbsessions, lovers indistinguishable from pimps. Details accu–
mulate inexorably, as if by an energy of their own, an energy in no
way responsible to the shaping intelligence that presumably controls the
poem. A pregnant woman, miserable about the imminent birth of her
child, surveys her room as follows (in the poem "The Wound"): "The
air stiffens to a crust. / From bed I watch / Clots of flies, crickets /
Frisk and titter. Now / The weather is such grease. / All day I smell
the roasts / Like presences." The evocations are so patently horrible that
one is inclined to dismiss them as the meanderings of a morbidly
diseased psyche, and it is virtually inconceivable that any serious reader
will sympathize with such a vision, for we are given no opportunity to
understand why the speaker should see her world from the perspective
that is developed in the poem. In a sense it is possible to say that
neurosis is here exploited for itself, because its manifestations are bizarre
and exotic. Miss Gluck would do well to cultivate the unusual capacity
for compassion she demonstrates in her successful poems, among them
"Returning a Lost Child," "The Game" and "Letter From Our Man
in Blossomtime." On the basis of these we can safely predict a distin–
guished career. For those who have lamented the laxness and mediocrity
of most recent work by younger practitioners,
Firstborn
ought to con–
stitute a most encouraging sign.
The poetry of Gary Snyder is monotonous, flat and superficial, and
probably for those reasons is much esteemed by a variety of people,
most of them very young. He is even admired by a few intelligent
CrItics like Professor Thomas Parkinson of Berkeley, about whose taste
I can only wonder after reading his recent essay on Snyder in
The
