BOOKS
size of a cathedral window,
stemrib grissaile edge-tasseled
with opening goblets, with bugles
in miniature, mauve through cerulean,
toggled into a seawall scree,
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and so on. Her enterprise was only in part concerned with percep–
tion or even sense.
It
was also determinedly intent upon overturning
the dictatorship of unemphatic plainness. Heeding the law of com–
pensation, she threw herself in the opposite direction - at times, it
seemed, choosing words for their strangeness more than their utility.
Still, her civilized bombardiering was widely applauded.
What The Light Was Like
is divided into five sections, all of
which can be seen in relation. "The Shore," "The Hinterland" and
"The Metropolis" are geographical panels; "Voyages: A Homage To
John Keats" and "Written In Water" bear an obvious titular connec–
tion . But the sense of wholeness comes retrospectively: every section
in some way meditates on death, art, and the mysterious relation be–
tween the human spirit and the natural elements which house it and
compose its habitat. "The thinnest of osmotic boundaries contain
what once/was called the soul," writes Clampitt in "A Curfew." This
awareness pervades the poetry and underwrites the astonishing
precision of many of her lines .
As in
The Kingfi'sher,
Clampitt is at her best- and also at her
most inflated-when describing the natural world.
What the Light
Was Like
is an archive of magical detailings. Eiders trail "a knit-and–
purl of irresistibly downy young behind them"; a warbler is "dapper
in a yellow domino/a noose of dark about his throat"; a gooseberry is
flavored with "the acerbity of all things green/and adolescent"....
But then, right alongside these perfect registrations, are passages
where the verbiage is so disproportionate to its subject that baroque
degenerates into rococco: "Mulleins hunker to a hirsutelrosette
about the taproot." Though Clampitt can render the slightest quiver
within the natural order, she can also cause us to lose sight of that
order completely.
"Voyages: A Homage ToJohn Keats" consists of eight long bio–
graphical poems. Helen Vendler (to whom the section is dedicated)
once praised the "Keatsian luxury of detail" in Clampitt's writing.
The affinity between poets is worthy of remark.
It
also explains, I
think, why this sequence - the most ambitious in the collection - is
so disquieting. The poetry itself is as exquisitely nuanced as
