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PARTISAN REVIEW
the ironies of history, the literary life, academic critics, and God (who
in an off moment tells divinity students "Publish, or/ no parish"). The
touch stays light, the tone silvery, the wisdom distilled. Some bits from
a poem called "Entries":
Two grasshoppers clinging to
a cold wall
in the autumn sun:
two old ladies
in a Home for the Aged.
Observe the small cloud
my breath makes on the mirror:
cloudy ... cloudy ... clear.
The error corrected.
But the eraser dust
clogging my typewriter.
Dusk. The dog in front
of the house slowly
becomes a bush.
Art to conceal art, intelligence to gratify rather than bulldoze the gentle
reader, an ability to take pleasure in the pleasurable, a recognition that
many things in life do not change very much in spite of our wishes–
these are, of course, old-fashioned humanist vinues in a poet. They
create a peaceful space around the poem, and within the reader, which
more strenuous work may fail to do. For better or worse, Pollak does
not approach the radical soul searching of someone like Morgan, but
resigns himself to the belief that love consists of "the hun never/ di–
luted or dispersed ... the unbridgeable/ one-way distances." Where he
intersects with someone like Ammons, it is to explain through image
rather than abstraction, as in the lines from an earlier book,
The Castle
and the Flaw:
All things are candles, even stones, although
we burn too hot to fathom their cool rays.
Pollak's title poem, describing a ten-million-year-old "living
fossil," a sacred tree which is still halfway fern, remarks that
It
knew Homer and Ptolemy, Michelangelo and Shakespeare,
and Goethe wrote one of his minor poems about it,
comparing its cleCted leaf with the duality (achl) of
