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BOOKS
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good thief. She has stolen from domesticity not only the trappings of mysti–
cism but the wisdom of experience.
BONNIE COSTELLO
PLEASURES OF RESTRICTION
HAPPY HOUR By Alan Shapiro. University of Chicago Press.
$16.00.
SAPPHICS AGAINST ANGER AND OTHER POEMS.
By Timothy Steele. Random House. $12.95.
THE GOLDEN GATE: A NOVEL. By Vikram Seth.
Random House. $17.95.
The so-called "new formalism" that has recently been attributed
to some younger poets is hardly new. Throughout this century, alongside the
tradition-makers of the modern-Ezra Pound,
T.
S. Eliot, W.
C.
Williams-such
poets as Robert Frost, Louise Bogan, and
J.
V. Cunningham wrote metrical
poetry. Rather than representing a revived fashion, poets who write in form
today share the ripening pleasures of restriction. This is especially true of
Alan Shapiro, Timothy Steele, and Vikram Seth.
In a recent article, Alan Shapiro has defended meter against what he
sees as a "vogue" of bad metrical verse, arguing that the wider the range of
forms available to poets, "the more enriched, more flexible and inclusive our
expressive resources will be." Indeed, Shapiro in his latest book,
Happy Hour,
leans away from the iambic line that dominated his earlier books, and tends
towards forms ranging from free to accentual verse to iambic pentameter
quatrains bound by half-rhymes. In subject matter, a backward, deepening
chronological movement shapes the book, shifting from the speaker's
emotional encounters
in
adulthood to his childhood relationship to his parents,
and from the filial view to a portrait of the parents' marriage. Although many
poems in
Happy Hour
resemble in their themes those in Shapiro's earlier
book,
The Courtesy,
the recent poems tend to be more explicitly narrative
rather than epigrammatically witty, as well as more ironic and looser
metrically.
Anxiety of psyche and spirit, Shapiro's previous subject, here develops
into obsession. This book's speaker is obsessed with punishment's erotic pain.
