306
PARTISAN REVIEW
If
there is something both charming and genuine about these lines,
and I think there is, it follows from the impassioned urgency effected
by the rhythmic repetitions - so that we feel a pleasurable rush when
we get to "the very words I was saying as I was saying them." This is,
again to quote Miss Moore (quoting somebody else this time), "prose
with a sort of heightened consciousness."
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, we find not
only a place for the genuine but a relentless sameness of tone that
can prove deadening when the aim is straight narrative. Where
J
ames Schuyler, in the long, prosey lines of his justly praised "Morn–
ing of the Poem," freely espouses, digresses, and leaps from incident
to reflection, Williams gives the impression of plodding solemnly
ahead in a straight line . We suspect that the means are too elaborate
for the ends - and that the moment of revelation is needlessly post–
poned - in such a poem as "Combat."
One of the most interesting aspects of Amy Clampitt's enter–
prise is her attempt to integrate into her verse some highly special–
ized prose vocabularies.
In
her book
The Kingfisher,
there are
references to music ("basso/profundo fioritura"), geology ("it was as
though we watched the hairline fracture/ of the quotidian widen to a
geomorphic fissure"), painting ("stemrib grisaille edge-tasseled/
with opening goblets") as well as to evolutionary theory, botany,
zoology, anthropology, architecture, and chemistry. The erudition
is breathtaking, and the ambition one that we can applaud with
open hearts - it's a welcome change from the familiar anti-intellec–
tual bias that characterizes the self-styled "deep imagists." At her
best, Clampitt fulfills a metaphysical promise. Studying a cove, a
plant, a bird, she brings to bear diverse ways of seeing and lifts ob–
servation itself into a mode of meditation.
Still, for all her gifts, Clampitt tends to pile up the references,
combining words with hyphens in an effort to arrive at a texture sug–
gestive of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Consider this, from "Linden–
bloom" - whose thirty-two lines form a single sentence:
a million
hanging, intricately
tactile , blond bell-pulls
of bloom, the in-mid-air
resort of honeybees'
hirsute cotillion
