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PARTISAN REVIEW
her dying father, the natural world described becomes increasingly
metaphorical, as in 'january," which ends:
He tried to show
Me where a red-eyed vireo might nest, the shy
Elusive whippoorwill might hide, but I could not
Distinguish anything except the wildest note
Of pity in their singing.
Green understands Emerson's famous injunction to "cast
one's thought upon the object." Her grief is subtly embodied,
made palpable in the concreteness of a world that "lies ruptured at
the root."
These are dense poems, full of an acute sense of history. In
"Last Year's Snow," a man finds himself engulfed in hallucinations
of snow, surrounded and weighed down by an outer weather that
becomes, in the end, an inner weather-a blizzard with "shards of
ice falling
I
for days across the shaken globe." In "Attic Bird,"
Green pierces the layers of a young woman's mind as she plies her
way through the diaries and effects of her grandmother in her
grandmother's attic. In the final sequence, "The Housewright's
Mercy," she explores the nature of work, of building and
maintaining a home, a life. The concluding poem in this last
sequence (which is tightly rhymed in well-hammered pentameter),
has a Roethkean lilt rarely attempted by contemporary poets, who
seem to prize flatness:
Who knows what heaven is? Or if we're left
With Joseph shouldering his ax, the girth
Of ringed infinity's elm-to try and glimpse
through darkness Martha's incandescent lamps.
Does broken Carthage most resemble death,
or do those workmen on the roof who lift
a horizontal beam, stripped to the waist,
still forge the final crosspiece of the West?
Anyone testing the waters of contemporary poetry in this
country would do well to start with these three young poets, all of
whom display a sturdy sense of tradition. They have, in their
