PARTISAN REVIEW
273
who have been to the wars, Dugan neither boasts nor sobs, but like a
man suckled on Virgil, Horace and Tacitus, he is businesslike and un–
deluded: war is interesting, but it is still hell, and an officer is still a .
"Pig / in a uniform," while peace
is
not great but it
is
good - the ex–
soldier can wake "from honey-hearted sleep . . . in his own bed for a
change" and the hard-headed
i
can grin at a herQ who has becQme a
statue, "to you the glory, brother, / and to us the girls." There are no
hawklike or dovelike answers in Dugan. He merely pays grim and
merry attention to basics, whether he sings of childhood, lust, liquor,
the dusty life of offices, city streets, domestic tranquility, birth, as
in
"Coat of Arms":
What a joker, like me:
he came into the womb
where I was, poked around
and spat and left and I
was
forced out wet
into the cold air. Someone
slapped me and I wept
to have become a travelling man,
or the cycle of mortality, as
in
"Winter's Onset," where, like another
Irishman committed to writing poems as cold and passionate as the
dawn, he moves fast from a brilliant simile down to first principles with–
out a trace of neon:
The first cold front came in
lfhining like a carpenters plane
and curled the warm air
up the sky: winter
is
for busy work, summer
for construction. As for
spring and fall, ah you
know what
we
do then:
sow and reap.
As
a craftsman, Dugan is extraordinary. He loads every rift with
concrete; he makes a hard, crunching music; and
his
control of momen–
tum,
is peerless: the poems, one after another, come barreling down the
alley like big black ,bowling balls and down you go.
Finally, as Jean Shepherd used to remark after doing a turn on
the kazoo, nothing beats genius. Risking folly, let us propose that
Joanna Kyger is a genius, though a weird one.
The places to go
in
Places to Go
are various head trips. In the
