PA RTISAN REVIEW
153
years, is a poem of anger in which Levine's vision carries us to the edge
of apocalypse, a poem so urgent and propulsive in voice as to ignore the
"edges" of syntax, logical relation, propositional sense:
From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.
The surging repetition of "They Lion" is like a cry trymg to find shape
in
language. The passage doesn't make "sense," of course, since that's
one of the points of the poem. It's the kind of poem Barthes would
applaud -- so wholly engaged that it verges on the act of abolishing
itself.
Levine risks a lot with his new poetry; and when his vision is wholly
private, then lines, images, sometimes entire poems fail to communicate;
sometimes a flat and predictable language seeks automatic response. But
when he focuses on the private pains and social ills of others, his best
poems oblige us to cry with him.
They Feed They Lion
is not a
comforting experience. More important, in its compassion, its skill, and
its rare power to disturb our dulled attentions, it is a necessary and a
valuable one.
An Ear In Bartram's Tree
is Jonathan Williams's selection from ten
years' work (1957-67), thus giving us a clear sense of the variety and
quality of his poetry. Williams is definitely in the American grain, a
Black Mountain product, an imagistic mystic, a disciple of W. C.
Williams ("my spiritual grandfather"), a hip Pound who stayed home, a
poetfteacherfbotanist/lecturerfeditor who claims in his "Credo" to "digf
Everything Swinging," an indefatigable promoter of others' work, a
writer who invites lists because in his typically American way he so loves
them:
house-leek
&
garlic,
hyssop
&
mouse;
hawk
&
hepatica,
hyacinth, finch!
crawl, all
exits
from
hibernaculum!
