THE STATE OF POETRY
511
Thermopylae and Olympia, the Lake District and London (in–
cluding Chelsea and Covent Garden), Venice and Munich, getting
to this last city by train from Saloniki. Her new book is densely
packed with the places she's visited, the paintings and buildings she's
seen, all of it colored by a dual determination to be not too indis–
criminately delighted , but not too priggish or ungenerous, either.
Thus "Babel Aboard the Hellas International Express": "Discon–
solate
I
brown man whose wife is sick climbs back
I
onto top berth to
sleep - the one last solace.
II
His untouched yogurt has begun to
spill. A mess .
I
The washrooms are by now a costive-making,
I
hopeless
cauchemar.
...
I
Stout ruddy woman ; lean, fair-haired,
ruddy man;
I
two small dark nondescripts; one human barrel ,
I
chalk-stripe-tailored, curly-brilliantined,
I
Lech Walesa–
mustachioed, jovial: with these
II
till Munich, we're to share what
space there is.
I
They speak some common dialect, we're not
I
sure
which. A bag of prunes is passed.
I
We offer olives. The conversa–
tion grows
I
expansive: we listen in one every syllable,
II
uncom–
prehending, entranced."
We might have wished for a traveller who was either more
comprehending or less entranced: compare, for example, Clampitt's
"Leaving Yannina" with Merrill's "Yannina," and think of the latter's
Samos or Santorini, Auden's Ischia, Bishop's Brazil. The Mediterra–
nean evokes from Clampitt, alas, only the usual associations-suf–
fering , Christianity, poverty, passion
(cuore, amore, dolore)
- and
many of the usual responses (touristic disappointment , grudging
cultural devotion). Clampitt is aware of the ironic burden that
devolves upon a poet who yet again takes up venerable themes on
grand subjects, and her book contains deft reminiscences of Keats's
"Ode" ("Tempe in the Rain") and Simonides's epigram ("Ther–
mopylae"). In places she captures well the grandeur and clutter of
the classical sites as one currently finds them, the "sardine-tin litter
dripped on
I
by mythic fig and laurel" ("Tempe in the Rain") . But
more often things Greek incite her to a willfully poetic keying-up of
style, a literary mood capable of issuing , on occasion, in such lines as
"the towering
I
quagmires of infinity
I
shrunk to a hairshirt" ("Atlas
Immobilized") .
Although traces of vulgarity persist in some of the English set–
tings ("Spring, when it arrived again, would bring
I
birch foliage
filmy as the bridal veil
I
she'd never wear" - with reference to
Dorothy Wordsworth at "Grasmere"), Clampitt's feeling for her sub–
jects is more assured, and her treatments of "attachment's uncut
