646
likely to be at every season, in every
month . It's breathtaking, and you
can find it all out before the bird
takes off, in a split second .
It's tempting to build these
texts into courses in information
theory, or the conventions of repre–
sentation in art and poetry, or per–
ception' or symbolism. But I'm
leaving my desk, cluttered with
Art
and Illusion,
S /Z,
Structuralist
Poetics, Beginnings,
and I'm going
silently to catch some of the late
fall migration, with large pockets
full of Peterson and Zim.
LEO BERSANI: For a clear idea of
the extraordinary (and, in America,
neglected) achievements of recent
French psychoanalytic thought, read
Jean Laplanche's
Ltfe andDeath in
Psychoanalysis,
translated by Jeffrey
Mehlman, and recently published
by the Johns Hopkins University
press . Laplanche's work is much
more accessible than Jacques
Lacan 's; is it too much to hope that
his brilliant work will help to
reconcile American intellectuals to
rigorous speculative thought, and
to make them realize that "theory"
is not necessarily a negative word?
NEIL SCHMITZ: I would like to
recommend the sparely written,
coldly twisted tales in Ian McEwan's
First Love, Last Rites
(Knopf, 1975) .
PARTISAN REVIEW
McEwan is a young English writer
(this is his first book) whose sense
of the strange often resembles
Alfred Hitchcock 's. There it is,
the strange, in a hard light. The
stories in
First Love, Last Rites
deal
primarily with the loss of English
innocence, which, like English
beauty, is a thing apart. His book
ought not to slip past the knowl–
edge of intelligent readers . And
then there is the poetry of Carl
Dennis. Can one credibly recom–
mend the poetry of a friend? If I
hated Carl Dennis, I would still
admire the poems in
Climbing
Down
(George Braziller, 1976).
They are lucid, tender, and Dennis's
line makes a kind of exquisite music
from plain speech . Much the same
can be said for another poet of
Dennis's generation, Robert Pinsky.
The rhythm sustained in "Poem
About People," the first poem in
Sadness andHappiness
(Princeton ,
1975), is an example of virtuosity.
The book's long concluding poem,
"Essay on Psychiatrists," is ambi–
tious, tautly ironic, carefully worked ,
and yet finally it is only poignant.
It addresses in part the vexed spirit
of Yvor Winters, whom we all
know lived intensely with his mad–
ness, was grimly married to it, and
brought it; leashed , to the lectern.
Pinsky relishes that vision. His own
quick, alert line keeps punching
into Wintersian sonorities .
