344
PARTISAN REVIEW
Books of poetry issue forth in the same way. Their happiness, like that of
Hecht's Proust, may be "glancing," but amazing when we come to it.
KENNETH GROSS
"Perilous Interface": Recent Poetry
THE
WOMAN WHO DIED IN HER SLEEP. By Linda Gregerson.
Houghton Mifflin Co. $19.95
BLACK ZODIAC. By Charles Wright. Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux. $22.00
SIGNS OF
AruuvAL.
By Jeffrey Harrison. Copper Beech Press. $10.00
SHADOWS BURNING. By
W.
S. Di Piero. Northwestern University Press.
$29.95
At a moment when most innovations in the period style seem exercises in
sampling, appropriation, and collage, when fragments, interruption, lacu–
nae, and the indeterminate appear to be the prized traits of verse, it is a
delight to read four books that value something quite different: exactness
of vision, precision of representation, and the journey of meditative dis–
covery.
Linda Gregerson's second collection of poems,
The I1iJman VVho Died
in Her Sleep,
confronts the fundamental questions of existence-mortality,
sexuality, and spirituality-with a wind-swept clarity and parabolic sto–
icism. At once, the modernist doctrine of impersonality and the mythic
expanse of the confessional
self
are forged into an alloy of strength. What
Gregerson produces are poems unlike any 1 have ever read, and in trying
to parse out lines of influence or a connection to the period style, I find
myself in wonder at the poems' originality, intelligence, and insight.
The book is prefaced by the following: "The source tale is slightly dif–
ferent: when the third daughter is asked to win her share of the kingdom
by declaring her love for her father the king, she says, 'I love you more
than salt.'" The tragic misjudgment of Lear is the lodestone at the heart
of this collection. In "Salt," Gregerson writes: "The banished one in the
story / measures / all that might heal him by all / that's been lost." These
poems radiate out from the inevitable pain of being a parent to a child and
of being a child to a parent. Each cannot love enough, in the end, to save
the other.
Hard to pin down modally, these poems disrupt expectations of nar–
rative, lyric, and meditation, shape-shifting from one mode to the next in
