308
PARTISAN REVIEW
We might wish she had stopped after "bloom." And when, else–
where, we come across "a totem-! garden of lascivious pheromones"
we find it hard to assimilate "the dripstone burin of the eons" a mere
two lines later. When the researcher in Clampitt takes over, the
result too often is cold intellect that fails to move or disturb us.
Frank Bidart's mastery of his prose materials immediately sets
apart
The Sacrifice.
It is particularly evident in "The War of Vaslav
Nijinsky," the stunning long poem that opens the book. By "prose
materials" here I don't mean only the prose passages about Nijinsky's
life that alternate with the verse sections of the poem. (These bio–
graphical excerpts are effective precisely because they stand un–
adorned, are printed as prose, and present themselves without
editorial comment.) But what's radically innovative in this
poem - and in Bidart's style in general- is his novel use of punctua–
tion: ellipses, italics, dashes, capital letters, semicolons- in various
combinations - perform the work of prosodic devices. What would
otherwise be prose becomes poetry of a high order:
-Even now, I can see the World
wheeling on its axis .. . I
shout at it: -
CEASE. CHANGE, -
The World says right back: –
I must chop down the Tree of Life
to make coffins
. . .
Tomorrow, I will go to Zurich–
to live in an asylum.
MY SOUL IS SICK, -
OR CEASE.
NOT MY MIND.
Bidart's book is full of torment and turbulence; his is an extremist's
sensibility, with all that it entails. But "if you demand on the one
hand,! the raw material of poetry in! all its rawness and! that which
is on the other hand! genuine," well then, as Miss Moore says, you'll
definitely be "interested" in
The Sacrifice.
DAVID LEHMAN
