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definition." Relations between the imperial center and the margins are a hid–
den preoccupation running through much of the volume; most of the poets
Heaney treats resisted, or operated at the margins of, "the normative author–
ity of the dominant language or literary tradition." Hugh MacDiarmid is
Heaney's most self-conscious objector to the authority of the "normative,"
but even Elizabeth Bishop, whose imaginative world revolved around the
twin poles of Nova Scotia and Brazil, he defines in part through her distance
from "the literary life of the States." Heaney is careful, though, not to turn his
celebrations of "outsiders" into an argument for parochialism; instead, the
local and marginal figure for Heaney as emblems of that world of imaginative
freedom where all traditions stand equal. The essay on John Clare offers a
moving defense of that poet's linguistic localism as a means to "dream of a
world where no language will be relegated," and the chapter on Brian
Merriman's The
Midnight Court
places this "poem from beyond the Pale" not
merely within a tradition of Gaelic dream-visions but within the whole tra–
jectory of the Orpheus myth, and within a context of sexual politics that
makes it eem alive and urgent today. The reader who, upon finishing
Heaney's essay, doesn't rush to the library to find the whole of this marvelous
poem, is a good deal less suggestible than
1.
If Heaney's prose shares the expansiveness, geniality, and muscular elo–
quence of his verse, Louise GlUck's essays, like her poems, are brief,
concentrated, and intense. Heaney's figure for the poet is Orpheus, celebrant
of the natural world. Gluck's emblematic figure is Psyche, visited in the dark
by a mysterious, ravishing presence; Psyche who, as Gluck puts it, "didn't
know what she would find." Gluck summons a sense of poetic art as inward,
questioning, allied to silence and emptiness; she is interested in the primor–
dial and elemental, in pure situations from which the contingencies of
circumstance have been purged.
The subjects of Gluck's essays, then, are often abstractions, and the
abstractions that engage her imagination are predominantly negative-the
book's table of contents reads a bit like a list of the novels Beckett never got
around to writing: "The Forbidden;' "Disruption, Hesitation, Silence,"
"Death and Absence," "On Impoverishment." This sympathy with condi–
tions of privation and helplessness underlies her powerful reading of Milton's
sonnet "On His Blindness." Mter a sensitive discussion of the way the
prosody of the opening quatrain brings home to the reader the poet's sorrow,
Gluck meditates on the relation established in the poem between pain and
patience. The poem "must convince us of pain" in order to persuade us of
the lesson of endurance it teaches: "In the presence of lessons, the possibility
of mastery can displace the animal plea for alleviation." Though Gluck never
remarks on the sonnet's personal resonance, she tells us enough elsewhere in
the volume about her struggles with writer's block for us to understand
