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to Justice's purpose. Al though Justice has been playing variations on
some of these themes for years,
The Sunset Maker
is as complete and
unified a transcription as we are likely to get; it gives us what
Virginia Woolf said James gives us: "the mellow light which swims
over the past ... the shadow in which the detail of so many things
can be discerned."
Like Donald Justice, Ellen Bryant Voigt is preoccupied with
the past, memory, and the emblematic innocence of childhood. But
where Justice finds in his childhood the genesis of a sublime sen–
sibility, Voigt finds in hers the blood ties that link her physically and
emotionally
to
the Virginia landscape of her parent's farm. Both
poets return to the South for their childhoods, yet their methods–
Justice's impressionistic and Voigt's realistic - differ immensely.
Whereas Justice sounds the clear ramifying nostalgia ofJarrell's
The
Lost World,
Voigt echoes the dense particularity of Roethke's green–
house poems. To this she adds something of the Southern Gothic - a
fascination with the terrible spiritual power of violence, such as that
attributed to the grandfather in "Short Story" who, though "a slight,
quiet man, / smaller than most women," kills a mule with a hammer;
or the father in "Nightshade" who, learning that "a dash of strych–
nine in its meat / could be a tonic for a dog, an extra edge," exag–
gerates the dose and kills the hound.
Behind the naturalistic detail of Voigt's poems we feel the pres–
sure of a moral world with its paradox of good and evil. In "Night–
shade" she writes, "without pure evil in the world, / there was no east
or west, no polestar / and no ratifying dove." The first two sections of
The Lotus Flowers
attempt to justify or resolve this paradox or at least
find a place where "grieving has an end." But there is no such place,
and in the final section Voigt leads us to the discomforting but in–
escapable knowledge that on ly death - through its mysterious si–
lence - resolves the moral paradox. Occasionally the moral weight of
a poem, such as "At the Movie: Virginia, 1956," feels too heavy and
strains the delicacy of its detail and incident.
The Lotus Flowers
is a full and mature work, and it marks the
culmination of themes and concerns which Ellen Bryant Voigt set
out for herself in her first two books,
Claiming Kin
and
The Forces
oj
Plenty.
This is a book that will attract many more admiring readers
to Voigt's work, especially those who believe that a poem should be
clear and accessible and concern itself with the rescue and transfor–
mation of a life.
