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ARTISAN REVIEW
sounding "Mariette" into the all-American state of "ecstasy." (America's
trial and its hope is its closeness to ecstasy, its inability, really, to
be
"static.") Hansen is part of that American tradition which quivers with
an
intensity of belief and rapture, the strain ofMiller and Melville rather
than
of Updike and Henry James. Without going into the ironies of how a
young upstate New York writer like Baker (setting his book partly on
the
West Coast) is so highly popular, while a young West Coast writer
like
Hansen (setting his book in upstate New York) is relatively ignored,
one
need only say that Hansen is staking his claim in a world as close
and
equivocal as Emily Dickinson's, alive with the age-old American concerns
of community and wildness, of sexual and spiritual immensities, of
tran–
scendence and its discontents. Hansen, with his intricately patterned liter–
ary text, teaches us about the world: Baker, with his avowedly post-liter–
ary book, merely reminds us of ourselves. Hansen has written a novel
that
takes us into the mysteries of the psalter. Baker has recorded a dialogue
that simply ushers us into the back pages of a glossy magazine.
PICO IYER
W aking Dreams
WAKING. By
Tom Sleigh.
University of Chicago Press. $8.95.
10 AT NIGHT. By
Laurie Sheck.
Alfred A. Knopf $9.95.
The
supple and beautiful translated fragment from Canto 9 of Dante's
Purgatorio
that opens Tom Sleigh's second book,
Waking,
shows how at
times we waken from our mortal slumber to discover the terrifying reality
of our fate. Sleigh's translation finds Dante, near dawn, rapt in a "vision/
... almost divine" of "An eagle ready with golden feathers hovering/
In
the air, its spread wings ready to swoop down." The vision, which Dante
equates with the imagination's ability to create a sublime passage or as–
cension for the soul, competes with the workings of divine grace, for only
by divine grace does a soul ascend the spheres of heaven. At the moment
when Dante realizes the hubris of his imagination, he senses that he and
the eagle, like Ganymede and Zeus, are burning "As a single flame, and
that imagined blaze/ So singed me that it broke my slumber." Although
Sleigh is not constrained by the theological constructs of the fourteenth–
century Catholic Church, he finds that the incendiary consequence of the
