348
PARTISAN REVIEW
and wait for its delicate wings
to become firm enough for flight.
The entire collection is carefully made, and is as a whole patient in its pac–
ing. Harrison's attractive modesty and attentive persona compel us at every
turn of a line, as in his elegy for James Merrill, "A Gift." Harrison, who
longs for a child, receives from Merrill a gift, a "helix of wheat," a " token
of fertili ty":
other times
it hangs in shadow
and takes on the weight
of your death-
yet the thread holds. These months
I've felt the pull
of this wheats talk whorl
again and again,
and thinking of you,
looked up to see it
suspended there
between two worlds,
in the changing light.
The sensational and the sentimental offer no temptation to Harrison, and
yet the body's senses and the heart's well-measured sentiment are every–
where given shape and wholeness in
Signs ojArrival.
In "St. Monica's at 17th and Ritner," W S. Di Piero writes, "What
god / lives with us in words? What word suffices?" Throughout
Shadows
Burning,
Di Piero's sixth collection, the poet searches for the words that
will suffice, for the words that will ring as poetry and yet be wholly
American, an idiom at once wise and wisecracking, at once rich and
rough-hewn, at once crafted and spontaneous. At the heart of this collec–
tion is America: America as a melting pot, as the interchange of immigrant
cultures, and as the interstice between the urban and the suburban.
The first half of the book, a section called "Pacific," grows out of the
poet's adult life in what seems to be suburban California, and the book's
second section, "Atlantic," focuses on the urban East of the poet's child–
hood. The book concludes with a final section, a single poem called
"Reading Ovid," which reads as a mock-defense of the method of the
poems that we have just read. And while they need no defense, "Reading
