BOOKS
639
SUMMARIES AND EVIDENCE
NEW AND SELECTED POEMS. By Irving Feldman.
Viking Press. $15.
SELECTED POEMS. By Donald Justice.
Atheneum. $10.95.
SELECTED POEMS 1950-1 975. By Thom Gunn.
Farrar, Straus and
Giroux. $10.95.
UNCERTAINTIES AND REST. By Timothy Steele.
Louisiana State
University Press. $9.95.
THE VENETIAN VESPERS. By Anthony Hecht.
Atheneum . $10.
What may originally have been a felt crisis or mere coinci–
dence eventually became a literary convention-that an autobiography
is undertaken when its author (Augustine or Rousseau, Gibbon or
Newman) turns fifty . Among poets, it is a common practice at that
age-and for reasons beyond the exigencies of personal vanity or a
publisher's stock-to issue a
Selected Poems
as a kind of retrospective
self-definition. Irving Feldman is now fifty-one, Donald Justice is fifty–
four , Thorn Gunn is fifty . Each has decided that he wants his new work
seen less as an addition
to
than as an extension of his career, his literal
lifework. And the very process of his selection is meant to impart a
shape
to
the body of his work,
to
highlight and thereby confirm its
dominant themes and recurring strategies, its stylistic changes and
maturing temperament.
Irving Feldman is one of those poets whose work, because of its
unevenness , benefits by selection.
If
he has not, in his
New and Selected
Poems,
culled only his best, he has chosen an array of his strongest
characteristic work. I hesitate to use the word " characteristic" precisely
because most of the poems in Feldman's early books lacked any
distinctive, consistent character. Or rather, each poem had its own,
each recomposed the poet's style-now droll, now plaintive, now
ceremonial, now querulous. With one hand he could write a straight–
forward poem-its subject clear, its details in order-and the result was
dull. With the other he wrote a more difficult poem-its occasion and
narrative suppressed, its momentum and often its meaning that of its
voice alone-and the resu lt was problematic, alternately exciting and
exaspera ting. "I love dial ectic and song, " he said fifteen years ago in
The Pripet Marshes;
as often as not, that dialectic was one-sided or
