BOOKS
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primarily about the "winter" of a personal relationship, that the choices
the speaker makes on the level of image and form are really discoveries
enabled by a desire to understand the ground from which he speaks as
art, not self-expression.
The proem to
J.
P. White's second book,
The Pomegranate Tree
Speaks from the Dictator's Garden,
is an incantation entitled, "The Black
Cat of Hilltop Provence," in which the poet sings the praises of his
totem, an invisible set of eyes and ears that will overhear (and oversee) so
many of the poems in the volume. After several exuberant homostrophic
stanzas the poem challenges us to:
Go ahead, ask it what you will,
for nothing escapes the gaze of the black cat of hilltop Provence,
not the least of all the grapes nestled in a bunch,
not the plump French women kneeling in sand and rubbing
their legs and breasts with perfumes and oil.
From where the black cat of hilltop Provence
sits on top of the sun, there is a place by the bluest of seas
for the nakedness of man and woman, the spilled religious blood,
the primordial smile holding ceremony while the icy pandemonium
plays on.
From such a cat we would expect magical answers, and for the
most part, White delivers; one easily catches White's infectious faith in
the power of his imagination. When the muses call this son-of-a-sailor
out onto dark water, for instance, in the poem, "Playing for Pickerel
One August Night," he does not, like Wordsworth, have to steal a boat.
White has a rowboat already "anchored in cattails," ready to nudge
away from shore where he can:
(dip)
the oars
into the light-green waters
opening oceans around me.. ..
For White, this is no voyage into anxiety: he has brought his guitar
and plans to stay and lay "all the notes ever heard in (his) head." And
while the figurative rowboat allows White to abandon dry land, to play
for the pickerel rather than for people, each land he leaves or has ever
left remains fertile, a sourcing: "I see in the dust / my own lucent face, its
many faces waiting for me in others ... " ("In Pursuit of Wings").
Pound, Mallarme, Hesse, James Wright, Su Tung P'O, Lenin, Nice, Ver–
mont, Da Nang, Venice, the North Pole - all these walk or are walked
