BOOKS
321
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The Gallle
4
S(a(lIeS,
in any case , is a bold enterprise.
The poel11s arc written with dash and speed. Several of them mix the
same I11alaise as "Difficult Movie ." SOl11e of them are slightly weakened , I
feel , by having starting-off points that arc expressive - about paintings, for
instan ce - and look like a pretext, when the poem itself is rooted in
powerful experience. But Martha Holl:1I1der - and this is hcr first book -
is already a persuasive poetic voice.
I began thi s consideration of four distinct and distinguished Amcrican
poets with remarks about distance and perspcctive. They show that thcre
are exciting vistas in the way the American poem is now composed, and
yet, even as an admiring outsider, it see IllS necessary
to
end on a negative
note. What l3ishop brought to all poetry was not brought
to
it as a matter
of poli cy. She did not deploy her background - anymore than Lowell
filled his foreground - out of some cool poetic design. She charted hcr
territory with all the obsessive pain, avoidance, dread and sudden discov–
ery which is the m:lrk of true poetic courage. It just seems to me a present
danger that what she achieved with instin ct, at great expense, may bc
treated by all of us :IS some so rt of ple:lSUIT park within thc poetic dis–
course: a place of c;1 1m borders and obvious boundaries. It is not. This is
the poet, after all, who said in :In interview that she felt "like a guest" ev–
erywhere. The place in her poems is neither calm nor easily reached. It is
- if it is anything definable - :I new land whose discovery is the more re–
markable becallse she was once lost there.
EAVAN BOLAND
Rock and Bone, Water and Soul
PROMISED LANDS.
By
Peter Sacks.
Viking Penguin.
S17.9S.
The title of Peter Sacks's first book ,
II/
Fhesc Malll/fail/5,
suggested his tics
to a particular heartland , but also hinted at a lurking, more general mcta–
physical sp lendor. Given this tension between place and spirit, his new
book,
Prolllised Lallds,
further delves into Sacks's obsession with " home" -
wherever (to quote Elizabeth Bishop) that ma y bc.
Sacks's birthplace is South Africa, his heritage Jewish, and he 's lived
on and off in the United States for m:lI1 y years. All three facts govern his
work, where place becomes a co rrelative to spirit, geography a guide to
