PARTISAN REVIEW
But the fantasy makes it ours, a kind of fence-sitting
Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal.
625
It's exhilarating to watch Mr. Ashbery maintain his precarious
balance on an "esthetic ideal" which seems to be raised higher with
each new book. The latest,
Three Poems,
(three extended meditations
in prose ) will exC'ite aficionados of his work, but it probably won't, as an
introduction, win him new converts.
If
in reading Ashbery we are referred back to Stevens, in reading
Mark Strand we are referred even furth er back, to Emily Dickinson.
Their shared community of stylistic concerns is so obvious that Strand
sounds unmistakably like the earlier poet in the closing lines of his
previously published "Moontan": " I know that soon/ the day will
come / to wash away the moon's/ white stain,/ that I shall walk/ in
the morning sun/ invisible/ as anyone." Also, the t""o poets share
access to the visionary experience. Strand concludes a recent poem,
"The Dance," by posing the rhetori cal question: "And who isn' t borne
again and again into heaven?"
But in Stra nd's best work, this visionary habit becomes something
uniquely his own by virtue of his transformation of the Dickinsonian
macabre into the surrealistic and phantasmagorical. Moreover, though
one previously heard occasional echoes of earlier poets in his first two
books
(Slee pin g With One
Eye
Open
and
Reasons For Mo ving ),
in
Darker,
his latest and best book to date. Ma rk Strand now sounds most
like himself. Here, for example, is "Not Dying":
These wrinkles are nothing.
These gray hairs are nothing.
This stomach which sags
with old food , these bruised
and swollen ankles,
my darkening brain,
they are nothing.
I am the same boy
my mother used to kiss.
The years change nothing.
On windless summer nights
I feel those kisses
slide from her dark
lips far away,
and in winter they float
over the frozen pines
and arrive covered with snow.
They keep me young.
My passion for milk
is uncontrollable still.
