BOOKS
70S
You get a little doll that looks like you
Wright is a visionary collagist. His poems depend on juxtaposition
and an aesthetic of surprise. Their voice is both personal and anonymous.
He works off the long lyric tradition that goes back to Catullus and in–
cludes a recent poet like Frank O'Hara. With their compactness and their
reliance on imagery, Wright's poems go against today's trend which fa–
vors longish narrative and more literal approaches. He quotes Keats's
phrase, "the reality of the imagination" as an epigraph and that seems
right. That paradox is his subject too. What Wright brings to the equation
is his tragic sense of life.
There are a number of fine poems in his new book, but this untitled
one may be one of the best:
This was the first time I knelt
and with my lips, frightened , kissed
the lit inwardly pink petaled lips.
It was like touching a bird's exposed heart
with your tongue .
Summer dawn flowing into the room parting the
curtains - the lamp dimming - breeze
rendered visible. Lighting,
and then soft applause
from the leaves...
Almost children, we lay asleep in love listening to
the rain.
We didn't ask to be born.
Jonathan Aaron's first book of poems was called "Second Sight" and
came out to much praise in 1982. His new one is more ambitious, more
complex and original. Reading his poems one is reminded of a tradition
of wonderful misfits in literature, unclassifiable writers like Henri
Michaux and Bruno Schulz, anti-poets suspicious of literature who are at
the same time its most dependent addicts. Only a style which is a carnival
of styles seems to please them. That's our poet too.
I always liked poems that have a feel of the circus in them, a bit of the
sideshow, vaudeville, fabulous creature, facts stranger than fiction, crazes,
superstitions and fake miracles, like this opening of Aaron's "Dance
Mania":
