PARTISAN
REVIEW
Small antelopes
Fall asleep in the ashes
Of the moon.
273
The images are insubstantial, exaggeratedly delicate. Instead of sug–
gesting the shamanistic depths of surrealism, they resemble images
in a
toile de jouy,
more decorative than mysterious.
Another problem in the poems
is
closer to the nature of Wright's
achievement as a poet. He is so wary of the strictures of traditional
poetry, so determined to bring his
~anguage
as close as possible to
the simplicity of emotional statement, that an air of oversimplifica–
tion and clumsiness is often felt as
in
lines like these:
Many animals that our fathers killed in America
Had quick eyes.
They stared about wildly,
When the moon went dark.
The new moon falls into the freight yards
Of cities in the south,
But the loss of the moon to the dark hands of Chicago
Does not matter to the deer
In this northern field.
- "Fear Is What
Quickens Me"
There is a puzzling contrast, in such passages, between the firm
structure of images, and the lumbering simplicity of the language
which reads almost like a translation from Spanish or German.
Wright is very much a poet of the 1960s. His work is central
to the experimental tradition of those years. A dozen or more of
his
poems must be ranked among the most beautiful to be written dur–
ing the past decade. "Lying in a Hammock At William Duffy'S
Farm,"
"As
I Step Over a Puddle," "A Blessing," "The Minne–
apolis Poem," "In Memory Of Leopardi," "To The Poets In New
York," and especially the unbearably painfui, haunting poem, "To
The Muse," are my partial anthology of Wright's best poems. Like
other poets of the period, he has so far given us a scattering of fine
poems, but no sustained work in which the governing vision and the
artistic achievement are adequate to each other.
II
The fortunes of reputation are strange. For thirty years, George
Oppen received the highest praise from men like Ezra Pound and
