316
PARTI SAN I,-EVIEW
by David Mura,
TI/Yl/illg Japallese: i\lell/oirs
<!f"
a Sallsei,
and three recent
novels by English writers which provide more insight on Japanese culture
than anything Americans have been able to muster: John David Morley's
Pictl/res fro/II the Water Trade: Adl'clltl/rcs
<!f
a WestcYl/cr ill Japall ;
Kazuo
Ishiguro' s
All Artist
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the Floatillg World,
and Clive Collins's
Sac/iiko's
Weddill,rz.
These books stand as evidence, ifsu ch were needed, that veiled
and robed in black as Japan ma y sometimes appear, the real Japan is any–
thing but invisible to Western eyes that have grown accustomed
to
the
dark.
MARK
SHECHNER
In Perspective
POWERS OF CONGRESS. By Alice Fulton.
Da vid R.. C;odinc Publishers,
In c. S
10. 95.
GREEN THE W ITCH-HAZEL WOOD. By Emily Hiestand.
Craywolf
Press. S9.00.
CHANNEL. By Barbara Jordan.
Beaco n Prc<;<;.
S<)'):;.
THE GAME OF STATUES. By Mar tha Hollander.
Atlanti c Monthl y Press.
S9.95.
There is a foreground and a background. Or, to put it another way, a
poem is an assembly of perspecti ves. In the last two decades the American
poem and American poets have been engaged in a compelling re vision of
these perspectives . I find these four poets - very diverse in other ways -
comparable in that each ca n depl oy the space which has been opened up,
by innovative poets and poe lllS, between foreground and background.
Each is determined to experilllent in that space. They put togcther their
poems as if they knew that in such a space, after all , momentous things
occur. This is the more remarkable beca use the brilliant, male poets of the
postwar era - Roethke , Berryman , Lowell - wrote poems in which the
ba ckground was made indistin c t, if not invisible , by a domin ant fore –
ground. Everything was point-blank. Even the skunk in Lowe ll 's poem
"Skunk-Hour" has to creep up to the poem 's powerful front-on scena rio.
There are no distan ces. Everything is head-on. The trouble about this is
that , even when such a poem is ambitious and successful , it occurs in a
restricted depth of vision. We have to peer over the poct's shoulders
to
