BOOKS
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If there is something like a limit to this ironic, self-flattering violence, it
emerges in the eerie voice of "Death the Whore," who hints through
Jamesian circlings at the story of an old love abandoned, betrayed to shame.
This Death taunts the nameless addressee wi th the memory of his own
buried desire, a thing at once dead and alive. Her story exists as the merest
fragment; it is present in a nameless voice, or a dim, half-visionary memo–
ry of a natural scene. But it survives to shape and harass the private self:
And now when I occur to you, the voice
You hear is not the voice of what [ was
When young and sexy and perhaps in love,
But the weary voice shaped in your later mind
By a small sediment of fact and rUinor,
A faceless voice, a voice without a body.
As for the wintry scene of which I spoke-
The smoke, my dear, the smoke. [ am the smoke.
Baudelaire's dense, bitterly seductive irony haunts many of these poems.
Auden is a crucial model as well, in his capacious explorations of form and
tone, and in his commitment to a poetry of wisdom. Yet Hecht's vision
shows at least one crucial difference from Auden's. At the end of his recent
critical book on Auden, Hecht argues that the poetry offers hints of a "hid–
den law," an occult, even superhuman order that shapes all forms of fate,
all returns and revenges, in the human world. Hecht's poems, however, see
no escapes from the dangerous orders and contingent laws that humans
themselves, half-consciously, often desperately, impose on the world. These
orders-including those orders we call "Death"-are the objects of study
in this sometimes frightening collection.
The strength of Debora Greger's
Desert Fathers, Uranium Daughters–
her best work to date-inheres not (as in Hecht) in the dramatic shaping
of voices. It lies rather in certain flickering, eerie landscapes, often collages
of past and present, the fancied and the familiar. Greger aims through these
at a delicately ironic candor. At the center of this book is not death but a
desert: spare, washed clean, wild, at once open and secret. It is a bare place
full of wind, full of a scattered and glowing dust that mirrors the poet's
words. This desert is no abstract, Stevensian fiction, however. It is the
Nevada desert where the poet grew up, a place made twice desert by the
nuclear laboratory hidden at its heart. The faintly Shelleyan wind and the
dus t, tas ting so strangely sweet, are full of radioactivi
ty.
