PARTISAN REVIEW
I loved her, but I told her I did not,
And wept, and then forgot.
I
walked the streets where
I
was born and grew,
And all the streets were new.
477
It still looks very simple, of course, but looking longer along the con–
vergence of the three parallel lines, in temporal perspective, less so:
the memory of lost childish innocence (Adam's fall), of self-frustrated
and soon forgotten first love, converge at the vanishing point of the
three rails in a sense of
le temps retrouve.
To do that, while still sound–
ing rather like rhymes on a Christmas card, is clever.
John Logan is nothing like so consistently sure in touch. When
a volume is full of verse translations and poems about other poets (and
the poem about e.e. cummings, unlike Whittemore's fine poem about
Frost, strikes me as a very sentimental and rather socially inept one,
simply because of its parade of, perfectly genuine of course, intimate
knowledge of the poet and his wife) and about artists, one feels the
poet has run out of life fuel. But there is one quite extraordinarily good
poem, "Lines on Locks," about the contrasting experience of the inside
and the outside (where the Erie Canal is) of the old-fashioned Herkimer
jail in New York. I felt here a translation into the condensation of
verse of the splendid sensitive naturalist tradition in American fiction.
How much better Logan would be if he waited for this sort of true
subject, and said "Throw culture to the dogs, I'll none of it!"
Aspects like this of Logan's book, the culture-vulture aspects,
and perhaps of the determinedly oblique aesthetic fabulizing stance
of Merwin's (though I think he is very, very much better than
Logan), explain the revolt, which after all is as old as Verlaine,
against " literature" or poetry
as
literature or
about
literature,
and explain why I shall deal with the last four books very briefly.
Hughes's
Crow
is like a new version of the Book of Genesis.
God died and in dying begat Nothing and Never. Death rules the
world, everything in it, except Crow, who stands for the ruthless
animal urge to survive at all costs. In its use of repetitions, its drum–
ming in of the same key ideas again and again,
Crow
is a scripture
rather than a poem. It has often the brutal impactive force which is
Hughes'S main verbal gift as a poet - hammering things in.
It
has
touches of grim humor, and just one short section, "The Kill," a fright–
ening evocation of the birth trauma, struck me as a very good poem in
itself. James Dickey's volume is much more humanly interesting. The
title poem "Eye-Beaters" is very striking. Some children in an institu-
