BOOKS
493
radical feminist reader- and, here too, the seduction is real and not
Imagmary.
MARK S. MICALE
POETS' PROSE
OBBLIGATI: ESSAYS IN CRITICISM. By Anthony Hecht.
Atheneum.
$15.95.
RECITATIVE. By James Merrill.
Edited and with an Introduction by
J.D. McClatchy. North Point Press. $25.00.
MINOR MONUMENTS: SELECTED ESSAYS. By Howard Moss.
The Ecco Press. $20.00
Reading a poet's prose arouses contradictory expecta–
tions. Will the prose be the wrong side of the poetry, presenting the
same in-woven shapes in a seamily disheveled guise? Or will it ex–
press an altogether new side of the poet's mind and personality?
Anthony Hecht's
Obbligati,
James Merrill's
Recitative,
and
Howard Moss's
Minor Monuments
are all books about other
books-largely, in the last case, works of fiction, while Merrill
spends a good deal of time considering his own poetic oeuvre, and
Hecht touches on poets from Shakespeare and Marvell to Richard
Wilbur. The questions, however, persist: how do we go about fitting
the prose into our sense of the poets' several worlds?
All three of these books contain treasures of learning and
perception, acquired (or at least worn) with elegant insouciance.
Merrill on Cavafy or Dante, Hecht on
The Merchant of Venice,
Moss
on Chekhov or Tolstoy are amateurs in the root sense of the word,
lovers of these texts, whose love, illuminated by their peculiar poetic
gifts, in turn li ghts up the works under scrutiny for the lucky reader.
Only
Obbligati
and
Recitative,
however, seem shaped by the
kinds of internal symmetries we expect of books of poems, so that
one piece in the volume speaks to another. Perhaps for the same
reason, the Hecht and Merrill volumes shed light, however indir–
ectly, on their authors' poetic methods and concerns. With Moss's
essays, neither the internal eloquence nor the poetic reflection seems
to be at work .
Glancing at each of the three prefaces affords an entertaining
