BOOKS
353
original." One section of one poem ends each strophe on the words
"shed, and." "Prom in Toledo Night" creates an esoteric, intricately re–
cursive form, which invites the reader either continually to hold one sen–
tence in suspension while working through another or to photocopy the
poem, cut it up into lines, and reorder it into its "original" narratives -
only to return reeling to the poem as it is on the page, with its interca–
lated segments of thought. These poems are rich and eldritch at once.
Throughout
Clamor
there is a
"girl,"
who, like Stevens's "hermit in a
poet's metaphors" in
Notes toward a SlIpreme Fiction,
"comes and goes and
comes and goes all day," a
"girl
materializing like a path along the ridge,"
then vanishing, like St. Francis ascending, then reappearing at the next
turn. She is bewitching; she is the poet and is not - or the muse, the poet
who knows that the "similar" always "Harbors difference in its midst,"
and whose poems blaze a trail into a whole new climate, wherein we
come to expect, amid tinted fogs and shafts of light, emulsions and ap–
paritions, shards of references in rainy abstractions, "a naturalism of the
obscure."
Louise GlUck's
The Wild Iris
characteristically contains no poem
longer than thirty lines, and many of the poems gleam with the knifing
ironies and the burnished paradoxes that have always marked her work,
while some show a new visionary fire; but there is a strong sense in which
this, her sixth volume, is really a single, rhizomic sequence, a complex
structure that we can now see has been evolving at least since her third
volume,
Descellding Figllre,
and which is embodied, in a less integrated
form, in her fifth,
Ararat.
GlUck wrote these fifty-four poems in ten
weeks, a period that lends the book an organizational element: the poems
in its first half are set mostly in the spring, while those in its second half
occur in deepening summer. At the same time, GlUck moves from
morning to evening, since the lyrics in the poet's voice in the first half are
mostly called "Matins," while the corresponding poems in the last half are
"Vespers." Taken together, these poems from the poet's point of view
constitute one of three kinds of poem in
Wild Iris.
Poems of a second
kind see things from the vantage of nature - or, to be more specific,
flowers and other vegetation in the family garden. The remaining poems,
whose titles usually designate a time of day, a season, or a weather condi–
tion, are in the voice of God - here a "father," a "master," a figure of
"authority," and primarily Judaic, regardless of the crepuscular Catholic
coloring of "Matins" and "Vetpers." The presence of this third point of
view puts Gluck's compelling sequence in a venerable and recently quite
vigorous but ever startling genre that reaches in English from George
Herbert through Blake and Yeats to John Berryman and Ted Hughes and
James Merrill.
