272
ALICIA OSUIKEll
The half-hundred brief lyrics on the unpaginated pages of
Living–
dying
are meditative, ruminative, formal. Some are nature poems in–
habited by trees, wind, time. Some explore the poignance of mortal
self. Some touch slightly on personal relationships. The emotional tone
is mostly one of controlled, classical mild melancholy:
leaf by leaf
returns to earth–
no one counts–
the number
is
too well known
As in Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay," the strength is in the under–
statement.
In contradistinction to the modesty of
Livingdying,
Sandra Hoch–
man's
Earthworks
is a big book which comes recommended by Norman
Mailer and James Dickey. Amazing, one thinks. Can these prisoners of
masculinity be recognizing a woman as their literary equal? Alas, no.
Hochman is a kind of rich, Jewish, updated Edna St. Vincent Millay,
with Millay's propensity to sway between self-adoration ("Here are the
Degas nudes-you say they look like me") and self-pity ("I am lost /
Like some rare bird
I
That could never be caged"), and with Millay's
girlish love of happiness, romance, liberty and bright sensual things–
though without her equally girlish political-social idealism or her ad–
miration for discipline and form. Hence everything in
Earthworks
seems
to occur in a mirror, at levels of emotion and intellect which sum
themselves
in
"my unwillingness to grow up." What of wit? What of
anger or lust? What of grapplings between the self and the outer world?
From a Mailer-Dickey point of view, Hochman is the ideal woman writ–
er: no threat.
Within these limitations, the recollections of childhood may ring
long-forgotten bells, and we may all sympathize with the evocations of
the woe that
is
in
mar~ge.
The empathy with seascapes, exotic lands,
feathers and shells, flowers and vegetables, will be appreciated by those
who appreciate such things. In brief, people who don't
read
much
poetry, or whose own emotional lives are not very well developed, or
who have pretty fixed ideas about what women poets should do, will
find
Earthworks
hot stuff.
-
Days like these,
to
take Alan Dugan from the shelf is like
fmding
another grownup at a birthday party for kiddies.
An
intelligent being!
You want to fall to your knees in gratitude. Warfare versus Peace,
for example, is a major theme in
Collected Poems;
unlike other writen
