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ROBERT BOYERS
not a poetry of promise, but of real fulfillment, and it
is
unlikely that
readers will know which older poets lie behind these extraordinary
poems. Zimmer's is an unusual talent, in that it is remarkably original
while working with forms that are conventional almost to the point of
inflexibility. The poems are short lyrics, and they have to do with
varieties of endurance, with life as it is beset by intimations of death,
and as it struggles to appropriate experience to the requisites of soul. It
is a book that beats with an almost subliminal and yet somehow irrepres–
sible gaiety, despite the severity of syntax and the deadly precision of
the language. And it has nothing in it of the literary exercise, though
the relish in words and in the sounds of words for their own sake is
obvious. Always what one notices
in
these poems
is
the operation of
control, so that the persistent parody of characters and of perspectives
never suggests the essential frivolity of light verse. All is weighed for
value and proportion, and the results are precious, hard, almost gemlike
in clarity. Meanings are never told, nor even hinted at, but somehow
understood, a matter of the poet's ability to abide with us in the objects
of his fancy, to maintain a perspective that is at once without and
within.
Each poem in Zimmer's volume has sufficient quality to recommend
it to readers, and so one is hard put to single out any for special
attention. I especially like the poems collected at the end of the volume
as
The Ribs of Death.
Here the poet's eloquence is somewhat riper
than in the earlier poems, and the vision more unabashedly somber.
StilI none of them, I suppose, is quite as fine as "First Mate Joseph
Conrad":
,My legs are worn to dangling ropes
By this ball bearing sea which rolls
The world against the frictional sky.
Even these waves which mime
The quarters of the moon are not enough
To hook it to a stop.
All
is
curves and angles.
Even our unwr.enchable wake would lead us
To believe our course was like the flicking
Of the sharks and salmons-the creatures
Of this watery, violent world, who know
The tints and foul moods of the sea.
But more than this sea
is
mutable.
I hav,e stood upon the bridge and watched
The subtle, cloudless sky grow dark
