BOOKS
149
One asks oneself why the sentence should be chopped up in precisely
this way and not some other.
The fact is brought home to one in the sequence "Feet," a meditation
in six sections on the human foot, as a register of the pains and vicissi–
tudes of life: the "gnarled and twisted objects" that feet become by the
end of a life; the grime on the calloused soles of the apostles' feet; the
price paid by Hans Andersen's mermaid for turning her fish tail into legs
and feet.
It
is a finely contrived poem; but we hardly notice the change
when at section three-about a casual encounter with a black American
who has been refused entrance to an "Eatery" for not wearing shoes (his
feet being merely wrapped in green plastic bags)-she moves into prose.
Similarly, "The Poodle Palace," about the incredulous reaction of an
Indian taxi-driver to a barber's pole, "in the shape / of a striped berib–
boned bone," advertising a hairdresser for poodles, makes, exactly as it
is written, an admirable short story. Levertov is alive to the beauty of
the world ; she offers subtle intuitions and cunning imaginative effects;
but her weakness is that there is, so one feels, nothing "inevitable"
about her poems' form.
The contrast between Samuel Menashe's poems and hers is striking.
Menashe is imbued with the "modernist" principle that a poem's func–
tion-and indeed the function of any work of art-is not to describe but
to
be.
Menashe stakes everything on, and places all his faith in, lan–
guage. A favorite device in his poems is to explore the double entendre
of common and banal phrases, with the implication that the subtle
things he has to say were always there, lurking in the gra in of ordinary
language. An examp le might be the phrase "make no bones" (i .e. accept
without complaining) in "Memento Mori":
This skull instructs
Me now to probe
The socket bone
Around my eyes
To test the nose
Bone underlies
To hold my breath
To make no bones
About the dead.
The same device is played with "come to grief" in the touching "Full
Fathom Five" :
