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PARTISAN REVIEW
ture poems-nonfictitious and, for the most part, nonnarrative–
than in the work of her beloved humorous Frenchman. How
carefully, how almost scientifically, she introduces and portrays
each chosen bird or beast or reptile, often very exotic species, sit–
uating each in its uniqueness in the midst of general nature by
means of comparison with other fauna, enriching the matter
also with literary and historic references, leading a long finally to
us humans, in all our complexity and depth and aspirations
to virtue and pretensions to immortality, swiftly moralizing,
apotheosizing, epiphanizing-more anthropomorphic than any–
one, and at the close of her best poems, briefer and swifter in ab–
stract vision.
Often, for a few lines at a time, a poem of hers will seem
to
be describing her own poetical style. These five lines, for instance:
... it is a power of
strong enchantment. It
is like the dove
neck animated by
sun; it is memory 's eye.
Let me now cite-that is, read, recite, in abridgement -three
other perfect passages from her lifelong bestiary: two birds and
one small rodent.
Her long early poem
Marriage
is about Adam and Eve as
well as generalized brides and grooms. And Adam in it is
Plagued by the nightingale
in the new leaves,
with its si lence-
not its silence but
its silences.
How this evokes the eternal Philomel, with not one really
descriptive word; as with a wand! I can testify
to
the truth
01
it,
with a recollection. Many many years ago, in the gardens behind
the Hotel Mamounio in Marrakesh in Morocco, dozens of those
dusky ruddy creatures, so much smaller than they sound, sang
all through the night.
It
was their rests, not their riffs, that kept
one awake-the suspense! Waiting for their small, wild themes
once more, and once more, but also wanting and needing one's
sleep; desiring to live entirely and to live forever, but by that very
