BOOKS
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Her poems arc full of the correspondences and yearnings she observed
in Bishop's. Her line is swift, with a lovely, citric vernacular about it. I
admire this in particular about her work: a tone which appears throwaway
and talky, but is in f..1ct a powerful and gifted stylization within her wider
themes; a sort of sibylline demoti c. These pleasures of tone make the con–
trol in her nature poems a real mix of verve and intensity:
Now is thl' timl' to writl' thl' pOl'm of your life:
a damp day that gOl'S unspokl'n , a jar
of ink on a si ll among slippnl'd whelks,
thl' hl'ld full ofbi-color co rn and young corn,
and thl' pl ain brown road to thl' house plump
with spilt tomatoes.
(" Little Art")
These arc wonderful gifts to find in poetry, and they arc there in
abundance in both
GrcclI Ihc IVi({h-l-la z cl Wood
and her more recent
work. But they have their price. Her poetry shows a controlling intelli–
gence which occasionally slips into a restri ctive one. Her work is rich in
irony but could do with being 1Il0re revelatory of those conflicts which
irony reso lves and protects. I don't doubt they arc there, but they arc of–
ten concealed.
Barbara Jordan 's nature poetry is closely allied to themes of the sacred,
but her approach is quite different from Alice Fulton's. " All things be–
come sac red fro
III
long gning," she writes in the third section of
Tutelary
POC/II S.
Long gazing is one of the pleasures and achievements of
Challllel.
Her poetry does indeed have a foreground and a background, and they
are determined by the twin distan ces she proposes of lyri cism and medita–
tion . It 's an interesting mix, and by no means as familiar an idiom now as
it would have been, say, to Cerard Manley Hopkins. Her inner landscapes
are not so mu ch made out of abstract language as her outer ones are com–
posed - sometimes quite wonderfully - of surreal terms. This is from a
poem called "To England" which is one of those portraits th at are both
important and exceptionally diffi cult to do well:
Kin gdom of backyard naturalists,
ca rtographn of sacred sto nes.
Once, your ari stocracy had a pniscope in every
chimn ey,
and wore , to hullt, the Ordn of th e Stoat on
their bpels;
Thulllbelinas floated in a walnut shell,
