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PARTISAN REVIEW
Any retrospective accusation goes underground here. The remarkable
ambition of the book's opening sequence is to make this landscape-half
edenic, half purgatorial-the source of the poet's own promise. Its wind
and dust offer the model of her own "radioactive" words. The "landscape
by which all others are found wanting" animates her desire to measure
unstable levels of danger and need, to trace buried infections, to count the
decays and half-lives of desires. The poetic
ephebe
finds herself, in a fashion
more literal than Stevens meant it, the "foundling of an infected past." She
recalls a father who monitors the radiation at the hidden laboratory, bussed
back and forth daily , returning at dinner wi th stories about coyotes and
wild rabbits, since he can say nothing about the "classified secrets" he bears
with him. Memories of a Catholic upbringing weave themselves in as
well-her first Communion, the instruction of kindly nuns, legends of
martyred saints and anchorites. Wordsworthian that she is, Greger offers her
desert as the model of all of our childhood landscapes, with their memo–
ries of daily tasks , their diffuse and vulnerable secrecy, their plainness and
poison. Here the landscape of memory is animated, even made sacred, by
what infects it. Hence no sympathy passes without subtle interrogation:
Did my father dread the Saturdays it snowed?
Where was the hush of a world brought to a halt
at the reactor's gate, the badge you showed?
He made the sidewalk safe for us with salt.
My mother forced a paperwhite to bloom,
pure as the snow's irradiated room.
Later poems in the volume put this mythmaking to the test. Troubled
residues of this desert thus surface in lyrics about Venice and Rome, or in
elegantly ventriloquized monologues by Psyche, Ovid, and Marco Polo (all
of whom appear in half-contemporary disguise-the exiled Ovid, for
instance, discovered making himself up for a transvestite's convention at a
provincial motel) . Not all of the notes ring flawlessly. Greger's interweav–
ings of lyrical order and diurnal accident can feel strained; irony doesn't
always keep sentimentality at bay. The shock of finding thus gets compro–
mised. But her labors in the adjustments of elegy, and in the disguises of
mourning, do bear fruit, as in a moving poem in memory ofJames Merrill,
with its strange echo of Lowell's "Skunk Hour":
