318
PARTISAN R.EVIEW
!awns each weekend, trailing power
l1lowers. Heartslaves, yo u've seen them: wIves
with flexed hair, hitched
to
bored kids,
twiddling in good li ving rooms,
their twin beds slept in, changed, made.
In
the nineteenth century the thirst for design, the intellectual drift
and purpose of the poet, was subsumed in the artifice of a poem. We de–
duce the eno rmous aestheti c will of a Tennyson, of a Dickinson, not from
what they wrote but from the way they wrote it. Fulton's thematic deci–
sions, rather than her technical handling of the line, betray the strong will
within her poetic direction. Her poems arc daring and broad. She will try
anything; and the latest thing she has tried is neither proof nor promise of
the next. H ere is one about "the credits and debits of co ld sex"; thcre is
one about frost. The seco nd is a bcy, tough mixture of ornament and
lyric; the first is a small, charged drJmJ of tone. Her language is not al–
ways certain and her tone is occasionally too llluch the same from poem
to poem, making for an occasional bck of freshness and variety. But these
flaws need not disguise her considerJble ski ll J nd the real pie3sures of
POll!ers oj CO II,Qress.
She is a thematic gambler of the best sort. There is a
range of perspectives in her work and she deploys them well:
Nothing will unfold for us
unle~s
we move toward what
looks
to
us like nothing: faith is a uscade.
Thc sky's high solid is anything
but, thc sun going under hasn't
budged and if death divests the self
it's the sole event in nature
that's exactly what it seems.
("Cascade Expcrilllem")
The remaking of nature poetry is always a cha llen ge within a dis–
course . Emily Hiestand seems particularly fit for the challenge, as does
Barbara Jordan in
Challllel.
But they take different approaches. Emily
Hiestand , both in
Creel! 'he Witch-Hazel Wood
and in some of her more
recent poems from a forthcoming co llection called
The Idea
'!f
HOllle,
shows a rare, and sometimes two-edged, gift for irony:
There arc givens - pliable days
when trees and rain flow in the field s
like paint fr0111 tubes.
("Making Our Garden")
