562
PARTISAN
I~EVIEW
Like O'KeefTe, American artists have often cultivated the isolated role of
the pioneer.
If
the American landscape has been frequently painted, it has
not been deeply penetrated. Perhaps the recent interest in painting from
nature marks a renewed aspiration for more enduring emotional bonds,
similar to those of Williams or Stieglitz. Charles Tomlinson remains at a
distance but invites us to share in an ongoing tradition which takes the
perceptual world as its source. His own interpretations of motifs in New
England and the Southwest remind us that art based on direct perception
is ultimately a matter of shared experience. Recalling New Mexico,
Tomlinson himself puts it in terms that echo Dante:
For I am in England
and the mind's embrace
catches-up this English
and that horizonless desert space
into its own, and the three there
concentrically fill a single sphere.
("A Sense of Distance")
Lush and Lean
WESTWARD. By Amy Clampitt.
Alfred A. Knopf. $18.95.
THE CONTINUOUS LIFE. By Mark Strand.
Alfred A. Knopf. $18.95.
Amy
Clampitt's fourth book of poems is very likely her best. Certainly it
is her finest since her first volume,
The Kingfisher.
Called
Westward,
the
new book is prefaced by an epigraph taken from Emily Dickinson: " ...
And bade it to the East/ Be faithful." That is to say, one must try to
remain faithful to one's origins, to one's initial aspirations and beliefs,
even as life leads one away from such beginnings toward completion,
toward extinction. This faith the poet keeps, for memories of her rural
childhood (Ms. Clampitt was born and raised in New Providence, Iowa)
and of her original excursion - both geographical and intellectual - into
the extravagant world are everywhere in these poems.
It
is not a faith
kept easily, however, for this book is her strongest precisely because it is
most consumed in ending.
Westward
is a book soaked in the awareness of
mortality.
Deaths, burials, disaster and disease: the subjects of these new poems
are grave, and it glvcs the work
gralJitas .
Clampitt's work has always been
