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PARTISAN REVIEW
write fragmented poems full of feeling. That's just what he's done in
the past, giving us poems of intense feeling in which discreetly marked
fragments sit comfortably together, held by the power of his extraordi–
nary imagery. But in
Sleepers Joining Hands
things fall apart because
the center, the essay, cannot hold the poetry:
I have sat here alone for two hours....
I have sat here alone for two years!
There is another being living inside me.
He is looking out of my eyes.
I hear him
in the wind through the bare trees.
I met the King coming through the traffic.
He said, I shall give
to
you more pain than wounds at sea.
That is why I am so glad in fall.
I walk out, throw my arms up, and am glad.
("Water Drawn Up Into the Head")
I'm glad Bly is glad; but I nevertheless want to agree with him when he
says that "What
I
have written is not enough," and
to
ask with him
"Who does it help?"
Robert Bly,
I
imagine. Although my quotations can't represent the
full scope of
Sleepers Joining Hands,
they nevertheless mark the
essential shift in Bly's recent poetry, as distinct from his prose-a turn
from charting and chanting the geography of America's psychological
and moral landscape, to mapping and mourning the battered terrain of
his own fragmented sensibility. And coincident with this development,
from having been our critic who most successfu ll y demolished the
confessional mode, he's recently opted for it himself:
"0
yes, I love you,
book of my confessions." Insofar as that "book of confessions" is
synonymous with his latest actual book, Bly's performance is sloppy
and self-conscious, as if he cou ld suddenly hear himself thinking, and
out loud at that.
With
The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World
and
The Book of Nightmares
we have a clear view of Galway Kinnell's
work from the beginning
to
the present; what's immediately apparent
is that the work, although occasionally excellent, is very uneven.
The Avenue
contains Kinnell 's first three books.
First Poems
1946-54 is the juvenilia its title augurs; except for a couple first-rate
