146
PARTISAN REVIEW
anything by Clampitt. The problem is that the sensibility of Keats,
the ostensible subject of the section, never acquires an independent
resonance. Dozens of ingenious echoes and appropriations stand in
the way:
how beautiful
the season was - ay, better than
the chilly green of spring, the warmed hue
of grainfields' harsh stubs turned pictorial
with equinoctal bloom, the tincture of
the actual, the mellow aftermath of fever:
purgatorial winnowings, the harvest over.
The
repr~sentative
passage, from "Winchester: The Autumn Equi–
nox," is a skillful tatting of the relevant description from Keats's let–
ter to J. H. Reynolds and key signals from the poem itself; "ay,"
"mellow," "winnowings".... But Clampitt has neither carried us fur–
ther into the Keatsian sensibility, nor improved upon the poetry.
Cavils aside, there is much to celebrate in Clampitt's book. The
landscape sections give an evocative thrill, and the long poems on
the death of her brother and, in the title poem, of an old lobsterman,
are heartfelt and strong. Strong, too, is "Black Buttercups," Clam–
pitt's farewell to a childhood house and to childhood itself:
I remember waking,
a February morning leprous with frost
above the dregs of a halfhearted snowfall,
to find the gray world of adulthood
everywhere, as though there never
had been any other, in that same house
I could not bear to leave, where even now
the child who wept to leave still sits
weeping at the thought of exile.
All adornment has been sloughed off; mood and setting have come
together like the two images in a viewfinder. The lines suggest that
Clampitt could move away from the baroque without surrendering
her special power.
I have not the space to offer anything but the most general
praise for Christopher Jane Corkery's first collection,
Blessing.
Unlike Clampitt, Corkery eschews decoration and curbs every im–
pulse to pure style. What these poems offer is an obdurate vision of
