BOOKS
To "modern Iife"-surrealist dreams,
The ex istential at extremes,
Group sex and its well-planned disasters.
I wound up with Johnson's Masters.
643
There are only a half-dozen poets writing today with the technical
prowess, moral intelligence, and exuberant gravity of Dr. Johnson's
masters. Anthony Hecht is one of them. Much of his new book started
elsewhere, and he has made his own-a brace of caustic imitations of
Horace, one of Ronsard , and two padded but affecting translations
from the Russian of Joseph Brodsky. There are ten original poems as
well, four of some length. The shorter poems show off Hecht's
celebrated ability to move through a network of images and :ibstract
ideas-whether exotic or familiar-by means of nimbly rhymed,
occasionally very intricate stanzas, each an added shade of feeling or
feat of association. But longer poems have always elicited-in these
new instances, in a cultivated but pulsing blank verse-his most
intriguing and commanding work. The four in this book all, in one
way or another, conform
to
a model established earlier by Hecht, from
"A Hill" in
The Hard Hours
(1967) to "Apprehensions" in
Millions of
Strange Shadows
(}977). Each turns on an unexpected but sad or even
grotesque epiphany, some dark transformation scene during which is
revealed the world's horror or the speaker's dread. In "The Grapes," for
instance, a no longer young chambermaid in a two-star French resort
hotel, leafing through an old glossy magazine and daydreaming about
a bellboy who has taken no notice of her, suddenly sees her future in a
crystal bowl of grapes: "And I seemed
to
know/ In my blood the
meaning of sidereal time/ And know my little life had crested.lThere
was nothing left for me now, nothing but years." Nothing but tears,
she might have said, since time has stopped for her, fixed in memories
of old images . That is the case, too, with the forlorn protagonist of
"The Short End," an overweight, alcoholic, empty-headed housewife
who wears double knits and sits alone in a conversation pit. The
harshness of Hecht's Swiftian satire nearly overwhelms the care and
concern of his character study. So too, when the impact of his poems
depends on raw sensationalism, on sheer pity and terror-as "The
Deodand" does-then I find them less sympathetic and illuminating
than merely lacerating.
"The Short End," though, also reminds one of Hecht's capacity
for the irrational or demonic as both subject and effect-a capacity
usually unacknowledged by his critics, who prefer to praise (or not) his
