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PARTISAN REVIEW
unfocused, the song too nervous and guttural. But all along he was
drawn to harsh incongruities, to the hapless, homely, suffering, or
grotesque, to material that resists neat designs or pat conclusions. He
dared to write, with a confessed inadequacy but with genuine power, of
the Holocaust-as in "The Pripet Marshes," "To the Six Million," and
the masterful "Beethoven's Bust." He wrote of immigrant plights and
urban horrors, of suicides and God, of the unruly self-in short, of
history itself, its tales and toll.
Feldman's last collection,
Leaping Clear
(1976), despite a few
lapses, displayed at last the mature rhetorical control and eloquent
invention necessary to articulate his wry or harrowing subjects, and
revealed him as an accomplished, important artist. The eleven new
poems he has added to those selected from the past confirm that
impression and his stature. He remains primarily a celebratory poet,
even when lamenting the heart's bafflement and duplicity, or the dead
as our "emissaries to absence." In the extraordinary "Elegies," an
ambitious eight-part meditation that embodies all of Feldman's philo–
sophic poise and patient, shrewd humanity, he offers an account of art:
"our tales are such late echoes of
10ss, / but
a promise of
recoverY, / the
deeper dream come back as the common place." I read that as a
testament to his own poetry's ability to define what, in another poem,
he calls "the human circle," in which the stories of the dead are given a
living speech, in which both poet and reader are "revealed to the world
of revelation."
It
is astonishing to see, in such work as this, what
grandeur Feldman has by now achieved, and it is very gratifying to
have this major collection by a major poet.
Donald Justice is an elusive poet, esteemed but not widely read,
and it is a convenience to have so much of his work brought together in
one volume: generous helpings from his first three books (many poems
in slightl y revised versions), and seventeen uncollected poems dating
from 1948 to the present. Whatever the convenience, a new book by
Justice is always likely to be a notable event; his output has been slight
and infrequent, his work fastidious. In fact, as a poet he is that rarity–
an artist at once deeply traditional and resolutely newfashioned. He
sometimes writes (as in "Bus Stop") in an intentionally flat style,
whose effects are predictable and tiresome. He also writes the trendy
kind of expressionist poem-though he usually does it better than his
peers or imitators-that heaps up portentous images with all the
automatism of a school exercise. "Hands" starts this way:
No longer do the hands know
The happiness of pockets.
