Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something unimagined, not recalled?
ROBERT LOWELL’S “EPILOGUE,” the final poem of his last book, asked a question that continues to plague the generation that follows him. There’s an uneasy truce between what is imagined and what is recalled, and many contemporary poets have placed themselves squarely in one camp or the other. As for the “structures,” contemporary poets straddle that fence as well. But form itself was never an issue for Lowell; he was interested in what he could do within the limits of form and what the forms enabled him to explore.
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter’s vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
All’s misalliance.
Interesting that he should reject the photograph, that he sees “fact” as stifling to the imagination. Ironic that Lowell, who could set the reader’s imagination flowing with his specific images, his staccato rhythms, his crackling electric sounds, should find these devices inadequate to reveal his own imaginary worlds. Intriguing that, so near the end of his life, Lowell could convey such strong desire for a new kind of vision:
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
The poem pivots on the question, almost seems to settle for what he has accomplished. After all, the “grace of accuracy” is not easy. It’s what we look for in a good essay. It’s the mirror embedded in the poem. One right word, one specific image, and the writer has given us something we now realize we knew, but did not know we knew. Yet the quest for accuracy is also the impulse to pin something down, to make language serve the event—but language is elusive. Sometimes it takes another way of seeing to “say what happened.”
I once watched a film of Picasso painting. After his first few strokes, the canvas was childlike in its simplicity. Then he added new images, drew over others; the painting became a swirl of color. At one point it seemed so satisfying I wanted to stop him. Couldn’t he see it was finished? But he went on, dabbing, stabbing, muddling what had been clear. Soon the painting was murky. He should have known better. Now it was ruined! But . . . he continued blending, adding paint over paint until once again the canvas cleared, came into focus, completely transformed into something that had been, for me, unimaginable. Picasso led me past my own internal limits to what he’d sensed inside himself.
Excess is the difference between the painting and the photograph; it is also the difference between the painting and an etching. The paint itself—layered, mixed, with its flecks of cobalt blue, its free and energetic or delicately precise strokes—creates the texture. In poetry, language is the paint. There are some excesses in poetry that, in fact, are the poetry. Like Picasso, certain contemporary poets use excess in the best sense of the word; their work demonstrates a kind of ebullient linguistic play that, even as it opens the imagination, leads them closer and closer to accuracy. They demonstrate for us the difference between “excess” and “excessive.” Within the space between more than enough and too much, they define the part of the human experience that can’t be captured on the film.
Stanley Plumly’s sixth collection, Boy on the Step, uses certain excesses as part of its method. The lack of critical attention given to this 1989 book has been a serious oversight, and I am pleased to see that Ecco Press has recently issued it in paperback. The volume’s intricate evocation of time and place, its complex emotional landscape, even its deliberate silences, make it worthy of our attention.
As usual, Plumly’s emphasis is memory itself—with sharply rendered personal experiences serving to demonstrate the process of recollection. So it is that the opening poem, “Hedgerows,” begins with “How many names. Some trouble / or other would take me outside” and ends fifty lines later with “and the dead father.” In between, there is no mention of the “trouble” or the “father.” Rather, in those fifty lines Plumly tries to pin down what his body remembers. He recreates not a single but a composite memory, an ecstasy of image and adjective. The poet searches in language to capture the specifics of a time and place:
The haw, the interlocking bramble, the thorn,
head-high, higher a corridor, black windows.
Plumly’s distinctive process is one of qualification: the hedge is, in turn, populated, named, measured, remeasured, and reexamined until it finds its proper metaphor as seen through the eyes of the boy. The reader sees through those same eyes, feels the depths of the night and the “voicelessness” that leads to a fleeting desire for death—a death that turns almost simultaneously to the dream of rebirth. The “I” of the poem imagines returning as the wood of the hedge, becoming the elm in the pail or the wooden bowl set before a “boy” who is lost in the thought of his father. The “I” and the “boy” are syntactically differentiated, yet they are linked by memory and dream so that the speaker can step out of the specific memory to watch another version of himself.
This pattern of qualification toward clarification is Plumly’s method of developing the “photograph.” It is as though the memory must be reconstructed one step at a time—like a negative coming clear—before he can “print” it in the positive of language. Once time and space have been “fixed,” Plumly can perform his linguistic magic: he plays with tenses, superimposes memory on the present (and vice versa), allows everything to converge in the moment of the poem. The “accuracy” is one of specifics (colors, height, precise name of bird or plant) and of emotional context: by courting nuance, shading into difference, Plumly constructs for the reader a musing voice that simply won’t stop until it satisfies a need for accuracy.
Repetition, in Plumly’s hands, creates another kind of accuracy. Images recur, incidents are repeated. The father and uncles stand on the steps, facing the camera; the great trees topple; the foundry flares; rain becomes silk, becomes glycerine, glitters; snow falls and keeps falling until it is ocean. Meaning emerges from the constant mulling and stirring.
“Against Starlings” uses another kind of excess. In a series of six “sonnets” (each line contains ten syllables with no regular rhythmic pattern), Plumly rivals Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” The starlings are seen not only as what they are but also through a series of comparisons, and the litany of birds with which they are not to be confused is a study in natural and literary history. The final lines wrench the poem from its ostensible subject to reveal the linguistic paradox and the philosophical quandary at the heart of the book:
I wished for one to come into the house,
and left the window open just enough.
None ever did. That was another year.
What is to be feared is emptiness and
nothing to fill it. I threw a stone or
I didn’t throw a stone is one language—
the vowel is a small leaf on the tongue
Emptiness thus becomes a theme. In “Cedar Waxwing on Scarlet Firethorn,” the perception of the fleeting moment becomes a death wish shared by writer and reader: “our desire to die, / to swallow fire, disappear, be nothing.” The three following poems end with “not at all,” “lost,” and “out of this life,” but as the book evolves the fear diminishes. The speaker recognizes and accepts a kind of human solitude, so that “Argument & Song,” in which the speaker addresses his mother, ends with the knowledge that “I knew I would need a witness / and would fail, and that any / other loneliness / than this would be impossible.” Plumly echoes this awareness in several other poems, but nowhere better than in “Cloud Building”:
it wants to leave
the body through the mouth and come back slowly,
pure with patience, shine slowly
as something else we’ll never know
except alone, like the sentimental
old, who are full of stories,
or children, who in solitude have silence.
At the center of Boy on the Step are the large questions that sound silly when you put them in words—What does it mean to have been alive? and What is the nature and meaning of death? In “Toward Umbria,” the contradictions are erased:
The season is ending, fire on the wing,
or the season is starting endlessly again,
sedge and woodrush and yellow chamomile,
anywhere a field is like a wall, lapsed, fallow
or filled, a stain of wildflowers or a wave
of light washing over stone, everything in time,
and all the same—
Plumly’s version of death, in which we are “scattered, or poured back into the earth,” is one of rebirth, renewal. The dead become a part of everything, just as memory is part of the present, just as the present calls up the past (“It comes in the least / disguise . . . “). The impulse is toward a rediscovered anonymity. Yet, deep as that impulse may be, Plumly also honors essence of the individual life. It is not a father he remembers in “Above Barnesville,” but his father, a man who “would not climb the ladder so loved by believers.” From his father’s denial, Plumly fashions a kind of faith: “For that I love him, and find him safe / in the least of things alive—dust on the road, wind at its back.”
The title poem restates this tenet: “None of us dies entirely—some of us, all / of us sometimes come back sapling, seedling, cell . . .” “Boy on the Step” is a series of fourteen more “sonnets” (this time each line contains eleven syllables) in which private memory plays a specific role. The speaker, as observer, becomes the “immortal” child in whom memory resides. In a replay of scenes from his life, the speaker reconnects the fragments and finds, if not meaning, solace. The dead fathers and uncles are whole again: the faded photographs will hold them all, poised on the steps, their moment a gift to be inherited by “the children of memory.” Plumly places himself squarely on the step, next in line.
A commentator cannot easily capture the feel of Plumly’s work, even with extensive quotations; each poem is a matrix of complex sentences and carefully orchestrated lines—a seamless welding of imagery and idea. The poems are particularly hard to excerpt because they are not centered on one key image or event so much as they are acts of memory, language, and desire. With only fifty printed pages for its twenty-three poems, Boy on the Step is a short book, but this may be part of its strength, since Plumly’s poems tend to sound alike, and the book makes up for its length with a density not usually found in contemporary poetry. Plumly’s “excess” is twofold: an accumulation of verbal qualifiers coupled with an elaborate layering of memory on memory. The effect is a kind of edifying distance with a passionate center.
William Matthews’ Blues If You Want is another book that hasn’t received the attention it deserves. This is the eighth collection by a poet who has earned respect with his lively wit, his abundant ideas, and his deep intelligence. Matthews, too, uses excess, uses it wisely and always to his best advantage. His is a humorous, playful overdoing—one of constant movement, darting from thought to thought, leaving the reader reeling in his wake.
Blues If You Want looks at things from multiple points of view, always finding yet another angle from which to examine the world. With his quirky sense of humor, his readiness to laugh at himself, and his receptivity to the oddities of language, Matthews builds for us a linguistic world where he can coin a word like “Housecooling” or pair poems with the titles “Every Dog Has a Silver Lining” and “Every Cloud Has Its Day.” But humor is merely the medium through which Matthews can make his observations. It allows him to sidle up to the serious—and this new volume is essentially serious.
Opening with two epigraphs about jazz, the book announces that it will explore the similarities (and differences) between music and writing and, by extension, between musician and writer. In the center of the volume, the speaker of “Every Tub,” a jazz musician on the road, states the book’s aesthetic challenge:
See,
the reason I’m a musician is, Language and I,
we love each other but we never got it on,
so as the saying goes, we’re just good friends . . .
In “Straight Life,” the final poem in the book, Matthews creates a companion piece. Here the speaker discovers that “I was with her / when I learned how some things can’t be fully / felt until they’re said” and concludes that writing and music spring from the same impulse:
You lay a thin slather on the reed and take
on a few bars of breath. Emily Dickinson
wrote of Judge Otis Philips Lord that Abstinence
from Melody was what made him die.
Music’s only secret is silence. It’s time
to play, time to tell whatever you know.
For all his playfulness—or perhaps because of it—Matthews does manage to blend the self-consciousness of language with the deep eloquence of the blues. There is also here, as in all his work, the spontaneity and innovativeness of jazz. “The Blues” captures an adolescent’s inarticulate energies (“I had the cunning of my body a few / bars—they were enough—of music”). “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” begins with an appreciation of the “smoky libidinal murmur / of a jazz crowd” and ends with the smoker’s guilty knowledge that he’s killing himself. Yet note the sensuous description of lighting a cigarette:
It’s the reverse of music: only a small
blue slur comes out—parody and rehearsal,
both, for giving up the ghost. There’s a nostril-
billowing, sulphurous blossom from the match,
a dismissive waggle of the wrist,
and the match is out.
Matthews’ light touch reverses the force field and we move backwards through the sentence, from the pleasure to its lethal implications to a burgeoning sense that music has a body of its own.
“It Don’t’ Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing” explores the language of love. In it, Matthews leaves his lovers undressing (“She’s / all detail and all beautiful”; “He hates being so inarticulate. He hates being / so inarticulate”) to begin a “myth” in which Language, stolen from the gods by Prometheus, laments her ephemeral state:
Oh, I’d give anything, she cried,
if I could be memorable.
Anything?
intoned the opportunistic devil from
behind a papier-mâché boulder. Yes,
anything, she said, and thus the deal
was struck and writing was invented.
But to be written down she gave up
pout, toss, crinkle,
stamp and shrug, shiver, flout and pucker,
the long, cunning lexicon of the body,
and thus what we lazily call “form”
in poetry,
let’s say, is Language’s desperate
the voluble body it gave away
in order to be read.
Returning to the lovers, Matthews gives their murmurs all the power of love. And for himself, “Could I but find the words and lilt . . . “ he mutters as he fumbles toward his own lovesong.
The title of the book suggests some complicity with the reader: take these poems, if you so desire, as Matthews’ versions of the blues. At least two of them have, for me, the kind of shattering clarity that reaches somehow below, or beyond, language. “Nabokov’s Blues” opens the book with an account of a trip to a museum in which Nabokov’s collection of butterflies is accentuated by quoted passages from his work. “And there in the center of the room a carillon / of Blues rang mutely out. There must have been / three hundred of them.” Nabokov had noted even the altitude at which each specimen was caught. Leaving, the speaker remembers the room, “vast by love of each flickering detail / each genital dusting to nothing, the turn, / like a worm’s or caterpillar’s, of each phrase.” The poem does not stop at this natural ending; with wry self-deprecation, Matthews pushes into the personal territory where the rage is not for order, but for “the love the senses bear for what they do”—with or without a final coherence:
the way
desire burns bluely at its phosphorescent core:
just as you’re having what you wanted most,
you want it more and more until that’s more
than you, or it, or both of you, can bear.
The darkest Matthews’ blues is “Mood Indigo,” and it’s also the finest poem in the collection. Listen to the music of its opening stanza:
From the porch; from the hayrick where her prickled
brothers hid and chortled and slurped into their young pink
lungs the ash-blond dusty air that lay above the bales . . .
With sound and rhythm, and with a repetitive syntactical construction, Matthews creates a haunting story in which a young girl slowly sinks into what is, if not insanity, a melancholy torpor in which she “kept to her room,” only emerging to wander the fields. The narrative element is important, but more important is the sense that “it” was always there—that she was, quite simply, too sensitive to live in the world:
It became her dead pet, her lost love, the baby sister
blue and dead at birth, the chill headwaters of the river
that purled and meandered and ran and ran until
it issued into her, as into a sea, and then she was its
and it was wholly hers . . .
This is the music it hurts to hear. Throughout the volume, Matthews has managed to spin the word “blue” so we can see its many facets. He has touched down, like one of Nabokov’s butterflies flitting from subject to subject, on the breakup of a marriage, the moon in Vermont, the theft of a TV and tape deck, the cooking of onions, a red silk blouse. Some of the poems are less successful than others, and the book’s publication was perhaps a bit hasty—Foreseeable Futures having appeared just two years earlier. But Blues definitely presents, as Matthews claims in “Little Blue Nude,” a “reverie on what I love, and whom, / and how I manage to hold on to them.”
What we hold on to in Blues If You Want is the accuracy of “the noise of my own voice.” That voice contains both wit and wisdom, and in most cases the two depend on each other. The result is a nervous, quick energy which seems to exceed the topic at hand and pulls the reader into the strobe light of an idiosyncratic mind. Neither snapshot nor painting, Matthews’ poems are collage—a careful arrangement of the fictive and the factual. Together they make up a sparkling whole.
Pamela Stewart’s fourth collection, Infrequent Mysteries, is a book of little excesses. More classically feminine, these excesses take the form of near-surrealism: slight oddities of language and perception, often taking the form of two words put together that don’t quite fit. The poems are not surreal in the flamboyant style of Dali, but rather with the blurred edges of the later Monet. The distortions become part of the clarity.
In a close and careful examination of the world, Stewart resists even the suggestion of a lens. Hers is the world of dream and daydream as much as it is one of fact. Where two come together, often with seeming contradiction, Stewart tries to fashion a language capable of bridging the gap. For example, “The Canoe in the Forest” begins with the vivid evocation of a child’s imagination and then qualifies it with specific detail:
Like a sliver of light adrift in the pine & russet shade
the canoe in the forest
has moved down to the riverbank, into the slow thick
water of a late August afternoon. Or you could say
that my grandfather with his wolf-
haired hands shifted the heavy tarp
& with a few slick tugs that silver eyelid of a boat
slid out, trembling
in the shallows as he stepped in.
But even as Stewart calls up her grandfather, his hands, and the tarp, she cannot help but see the boat as an “eyelid”; the poem is not a recounted incident but a reconstructed scene. In the story he brought back home, her grandfather found a dead man in the river. In the poem, the child conjures dead men everywhere before she comes to terms with statistics (“Still, all canoes with their silvers, reds & greens / keep slipping along rivers, & dark New England lakes”) and realizes that some experiences are singular, that only one canoe went sliding “into that celestial chill.”
Many of the poems in Infrequent Mysteries contain such contraries. There is a clash between the sharp visual images of the real world and the surprising juxtapositions of a nebulous otherworld. This is characterized by the choice of language or image, and the reader learns to accept this as part of the poem’s “meaning.” “The Edge of Things,” for instance, opens with two stanzas that defy narrative logic:
You want to know who sleeps on the other side
of the wall—there’s a feeling
of needles in his legs, a silence of orphans.
His name and age are not important. He must
be less than young. Over that tree,
a hawk blesses one of his hands.
You are not sure, right or left. Or do they mean
the print of ash across his mouth?
The poem goes on, however, to articulate what is central to the volume—that “one side of the wall is unbearable softness.” Stewart is willing to explore that vulnerability: “You want to know why this someone is sleeping / during the exact moments that you sleep.” The body carries with it its dreaming counterpart. Why is that experience any less real?
Like an iron filing, Stewart is drawn to the magnet of dichotomy. The world divides, and Stewart inhabits the division. As in “The Bostonian Reading Amichai,” she can claim that “nothing exact / ever called to me.” Unlike Amichai, who can “argue / with God how none of it makes sense,” Stewart simply tries to accommodate the blurred edges. She sees herself (as in “On Rereading, Yet Again, Tender Is the Night”) as having an “other life.” That life contains the timelessness of childhood reverie, the supreme darkness of childhood fear, the vast spaces between lovers together or apart; it steps into imaginary spaces and feels the pain of the alcoholic mother or the fantasies of a fatherless girl; it imagines itself the bulimic daughter of Fiction—a cold, demanding father.
But the real world intrudes, as “My Other Insomnia” so clearly demonstrates. Remembering that her first boyfriend was Armenian, the speaker tries to come to grips with history:
What do I really know in this violent dawn
where rooms stay warm if the bills are paid? I’m safe, useless
against those drenched & foreign blades. So, I remembered John
& our soft, misplaced kisses as I hear the thick
blue rain outside batter to get in & fill my sleeplessness
with that cold, other burning from which I’m not immune.
Infrequent Mysteries is haunted by separation over time and space. The poems step in and out of time, mediating between the person then and the person now. In the present, the speaker watches hunters on a “drab December hill.” In the past, she hears her parents arguing. The moments are linked by the same knot in her stomach—“Like her, I’m racked by the long / grey silences between.” Stewart’s naturally associative mind creates connective tissue, as in the final lines of “Naïve Reading”:
I’m in the mirror
not yet taking sides. But behind me
something stirs light as summer leaves
or an eyelash of God—your ghosts
that lick across the world, like fog.
Stewart’s voice is strongest when she is most uncertain. Thus, the sixth section of the long title poem captures the very clarity of confusion: “There’s a time before anything is sure— / Is birdsong bright / or dark . . . ?” And there is something very sure in the odd images of “Dreams click awake / testing their teeth on the rafters.” One of the dangers of this style is that when the words don’t surprise, they may fall flat. Phrases like “buttercups insist on yellow” or “hurt was possible to lose” show strain. And there’s a precious quality to “fire / pleasures my existence.” These moments are rare; they seem to come when the poem is forced—when the internal twilight does not quite equal the external dusk. Otherwise, Stewart’s synesthetic images give us a glimpse of that “other” world where mystery is, briefly, understood.
The title poem flits skittishly from dream to desire, from waking observation to philosophical questioning. Moving between its “walls” and “spaces,” the impersonal voice of the speaker asserts that “The personal / is a small space, or no space at all, / until something calls from the world outside.” Instantly, the voice becomes more personal, owns its own space in a kind of ars poetica:
I hear the sound of rain before it falls, see
the light-coming-down which becomes
that sound. How inexact I am
among the people within these walls.
Rain comes from a world outside.
This moment I live in the wall
of my skull where it’s raining.
I want only the dark sound of it—
that thin pure voice to inhabit me.
Meditations on the inexact are Stewart’s strength. She gives us another side of human experience, one that eludes the silver nitrate of the film. Or else she clicks her multiple exposures so that image folds into image, decade into decade, the final print an accumulation of sensory stimuli that tell their own kind of truth.
Albert Goldbarth’s latest book is called Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology. Its 118 pages cover just about everything imaginable and, in some way, do examine the dynamics of the universe. Working from a dazzling catalogue of facts (from historical oddities to the latest Guinness Book of Records), from a lexicon of the latest scientific theories, from a variety of personal experiences, and with an almost excruciating honesty, Goldbarth perfects the parallel arts of synthesis and digression.
These poems must be experienced. Funny, ironic, bitter, hilarious, irreverent, sexy, serious—the list of adjectives could apply, in turn, to almost every poem. To excerpt is to try to exert control over Goldbarth’s exhilarating thoughts, yet the effect of the poems is to be nearly out of control, or in a carefully controlled chaos, like a roller-coaster ride. Each loop and curve holds a new surprise; the poems reel with a kind of manic energy, step off into space, return again with acerbic accuracy. In fact, Goldbarth’s very style is excess: poems with excessively long sentences packed with an excess of fact, speculation, and memories—data of all kinds which threaten to bury the reader or leave him far behind. For example, the opening stanza of “A Paean to the Concept” (a title almost guaranteed to put off the reader) is one long language-loving sentence:
On show tonight, the maestrochef in his puffpastry headgear
veers a flapjack cunningly through a high arc like a porpoise-breach,
from right pan into left then back, the flapjack taking on
the sinuous wiffle a unicellular creature swims with, finally
taking on unbroken rushing grace of a pour
of water itself; the chef by now is one with it, is boneless
background motion, giving just the tilt and rhythm
of one of those rubber-ball-attached-by-a-rubber-string-to-a-paddle
champions, in whom we see the current and its banks are of
a piece.
The wonder of Goldbarth, his magic, is that, despite the frenzy of words and ideas, it all does add up to something. And it does more than add up—it captivates, fascinates, and even informs. Finally, it moves.
Goldbarth’s method almost seems intended to fend off revelation, as if his verbosity were a protective gesture, a kind of forced play. Even when these poems take on painful or personal subjects, they act flippant, almost daring you to care more than they do. Yet in the end, most of them are deadly earnest—which is why they need some mitigating humor. “Sentimental,” for example, poses the question of sentimentality. It begins with a stereotypical wedding scene, moves through pie and “puppydogs” to “When my father was buried, / the gray snow in the cemetery was the sheet tin. If I said / that?” From there, Goldbarth evokes “Hollywood hack violinists,” moves on, circling through blues singers and crippled girls to the true, and finely rendered, sentiment:
What if I simply put the page down,
rocked my head in my own folded elbows, forgot
the rest of it all, and wept? What if I stepped into
the light of that page, a burnished and uncompromising
light, and walked back up to his stone a final time,
just that, no drama, and it was so cold,
and the air was so brittle, metal buckled
out song like a bandsaw, and there, from inside me,
where they’d been lost in shame and sophistry
all these years now, every last one of my childhood’s
heartwormed puppydogs found its natural voice.
Goldbarth makes demands on the reader. He challenges you to be as deft, as witty, as expansive, and as emotionally large as he is. Readers who consign him to the category of “humor” fail to see that, as in most good comedy, the poems are a way to bear the pain. Goldbarth may make light of the tedium of Hebrew school—“Elijah this. / The Children of Israel that . / And Moses. Moses in the bulrushes, Moses / blahblahblah”—but he never loses sight of his origins. He writes with empathy of the relatives who came to this country in steerage. In “Mishipasinghan, Lumchipamudana, etc.,” he moves from the Quechua’s thousand words for potato to the one (invented?) word—peynisht—which can mean only a political prisoner’s stunned state of being. He can, in “Another Portrait,” respond to Joseph Epstein’s question, “What if Lowell’s poem ‘My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow’ were instead entitled ‘My Last Afternoon with Uncle Morris Shapiro’?” The resulting poem is humorous, yes, but also human, humane. One poem, appropriately titled “‘Too Much,’” ends with the young boy watching his squabbling parents return home through the snow:
They’re giggling with each other, and their breaths
run ahead like white minks on a leash.
Goldbarth’s poems are spun from an encyclopedic mind that engages odd snippets of information as well as the whole of scientific treatises. Anything is fair game, is part of the celestial mush. So, on reading that ninety direct-mail solicitations were sent to Henry David Thoreau in 1988, Goldbarth begins “A Letter”:
At the end of a day that’s rubble around me,
shrimp husks, tufts on a barber’s floor, heaped circus doo,
at the burr tail-end, the tar tail-end,
the shitty piggy corkscrew tail-end of a day like that,
when all the dauby, wadded toilet paper staunchings of the
shaving mistakes
of a lifetime buzz about this air like ghost wasps,
and to try to even say a word like graciousness or honor
coughs a bile-larded furball up into the throat . . .
at the end of a day like that, I pick you up,
Old Chisel-Puss, and head out to the last, thin brothlight
just to read some random observation you whittled,
cleansed in lime and ashes, then set on your simple sill
for the world to do as it will with it, yes,
Henry David, Old Man Applemash, Hardwood Grainface, you.
For all the tongue-twisting vocabulary, the poems read easily out loud, reminiscent of T. S. Eliot’s ability to catch the exact cadences of speech. Naturally iambic, never singsong, the Goldbarth line is, quite simply, fun.
Heaven and Earth is divided into four sections—Talk, Love, Others, and Physics. Each section, however, instantly spills into the other categories. No area of knowledge can be isolate; everything connects in one way or another. If cosmology implies a philosophy, Goldbarth’s might be simply this: in a universe so vast, we have each other. We step out into “used light” and recycled breath. Our human connections are imperfect but essential, and they are lovely in their frailty:
come snuggle next to you, and love what there is
in a living surface, love what it means to be here
at the end of uncountable miles of lacelike nerve,
lung-lining, nephron tubule, snaggled delicate
blood we see fronded through eyes, here
where our days with each other
hang by their precious, hang by their pitiful, threads.
(“The History of Buttons”)
Is Heaven and Earth “too much”? Maybe. If so, it’s too much of a good thing. Individual poems are hard to keep in mind as others keep coming in seemingly infinite permutations, but, as in the Picasso painting, everything eventually comes clear. The book ends on a quiet note, with the final line of “The Sciences Sing a Lullabye” also defining the poetry. “History says: here are the blankets, layer on layer, down and down.” Reading this cosmology is like looking through both ends of a telescope at once.
Les Murray’s excesses are, first of all, “natural”: both the landscape he draws on and the language he employs are exotic to the American eye and ear. (Surely, in a land of dingo and kangaroo, jacaranda and broom, drinks called bikavér, and place names like Coolongolook and Flying-Fox Cooking Place—surely, in such a land, language must become an obsession?) Spanning twenty-two years and seven previous volumes, The Rabbiter’s Bounty is a collected volume designed to introduce Murray to us as one of Australia’s finest poets. His range is as wide as his continent; the poems encompass landscape, personal memory, science and technology, Australian folklore and history, English and Celtic culture, politics, philosophy, and religion. But for all its varied subjects, The Rabbiter’s Bounty is grounded in a family farm at Bunyah, in the bush country north of Sydney. That land—and its history—is the center of the compass from which Murray can draw concentric circles, pulling into the net of his poems the aboriginal culture, the immigrant expansion, four generations of family, neighbors, friends, familiar fields, and the distant horizon. In “Thinking About Aboriginal Land Rights, I Visit the Farm I Will Not Inherit,” Murray recognizes the inevitable:
Watching from the barn the seedlight and nearly-all-down
currents of a spring day, I see the only lines bearing
consistent strain are the straight ones: fence, house, corner,
outermost furrows.
As he envisions the way the bush would come back, “unrobbing” the bee trees, everything returning to what it once was, he nevertheless cannot give up his love for the land, his desire to be part of it: “I go into the earth near the feed shed for thousands of years.”
There’s a recognized tension between the immigrant’s hard-won claim and the longer history of the land (“it is the earth / that holds our mark longest, that soil dug never returns / to primal coherence”), and Murray honors both. An early poem, “Noonday Axeman,” captures the wordless pleasure of felling a tree with “Axe-fall, echo and silence.” Like a refrain, the phrase resounds throughout the poem:
Axe-fall, echo and silence. Dreaming silence
Though I myself run to the cities, I will forever
be coming back here to walk, knee-deep in ferns,
up and away from this metropolitan century . . .
He returns to his ancestors (“axemen, dairymen, horse-breakers, / now coffined in silence”) but carries with him the “dreaming silence” of aborigines. So it is that Murray fashions his own songlines in the poems like “The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle,” “The Dialectic of Dreams,” or “Walking to the Cattle Place” with its fifteen complex sections. The final part of “Walking” is a synthesis, an “old song and an ancient one,” which opens with the voice of the cattle:
Their speech is a sense of place
night makes remote
lucerne fields in the dark hills are renamed
Moorea, Euboea.
That bull invoking Mundubbera, Karuah
and Speewah, now, Speewah
is trying his sultanate out in infinite space.
It is a delectation, the matter of rock-salt,
a drawn sparkling mouth
squaremouth, though, for the mother
mourning at the five-bar
gate for her tongue-sculpted, milky one
manhandled to the mad chute, steel-barred,
gone above gears.
One wants to quote poem after poem, just to savor the excellent excess of sound. Murray’s poems are English church bells, ringing each change in crisp air. They are also Australian idiom, the language of working men and farmers. Murray has such a meticulous ear and sure sense of form that he can slip easily in and out of intricate slant rhyme, metrical patterns, shifting rhyme schemes, and rhythmic modulations from short spurts to long luxuriant lines. All of English poetic tradition is clearly behind him, but Murray makes it new again with the sheer energy of his Australian speech rhythms and his honest intimacy. In addition, many of the poems contain multiple voices—fragments from letters, overheard conversation, recounted stories, the speaker’s own interior voice—and a rough, expansive humor that is characteristically Australian. “Quintets for Robert Morley” celebrates fat people with real verve (“Never trust a lean meritocracy”), and “The Quality of Sprawl” goes on to define, through a series of examples, the gutsy, utilitarian anti-elitism of Australian culture—a matter of spirit more than style:
Sprawl is the quality
of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce
into a farm utility truck, and sprawl
is what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts
to buy the vehicle back and repair its image.
The success of the poem is that it ends still elaborating what it never quite pins down:
Sprawl leans on things. It is loose-limbed in its mind.
Reprimanded and dismissed
it listens with a grin and one boot up on the rail
of possibility. It may have to leave the Earth.
Being roughly Christian, it scratches the other cheek
and thinks it unlikely. Though people have been shot for sprawl.
Murray treats us not only to the richnesses of language, but also to the buried meanings of individual words. In “Bent Water in the Tasmanian Highlands,” the rapids are seen as “The continuous ocean round a planetary stone, braiding uptilts / after swoops, echo-forms, arches built from above and standing / on flourish, clear storeys, translucent honey-glazed clerestories—” In the final year-long cycle of poems, playing with the word “misericord,” he moves to breathtaking elegy:
Grief is nothing you can do, but do,
worst work for least reward,
pulling your heart out through your eyes
with tugs of the misery cord.
The penultimate poem in The Rabbiter’s Bounty is philosophical and deeply religious, connecting the immediacy of the present to the expanses of geological time. “Aspects of Language and War on the Gloucester Road” begins, “I travel a road cut through time / by bare feet and boots without socks.” As the speaker drives to the railroad station, passing his farm, the cemetery, his great-grandmother’s Chinese elm, he meditates on war and on the history of the land—its place names, the brief lives of the settlers. With a careful sprinkling of “the old language”(words like baga waga and ba:rung), a chorus of exterior voices, and a strong narrative thread, time is condensed as Murray fuses all experience into one elemental tongue:
. . . and under the purple coast of the Mograni
and its trachyte west wall scaling in the sky
I will swoop to the valley and Gloucester Rail
where boys hand-shunted trains to load their cattle
and walk on the platform, glancing west at that country
of running creeks, the stormcloud-coloured Barrington,
the land, in lost Gaelic and Kattangal, of Barandan.
The final lines of “Recourse to the Wilderness” speak for the rest of the poems, evoking both a personal and historical past, a powerfully felt presence in the world:
Where the spirits of sea-cliffs
hovered on the plain
I would remember routines we had invented
for putting spine into shapeless days: the time
we passed at a crouching trot down Wynyard Concourse
telling each other in loud mock-Aranda and gestures
what game we were tracking down what haunted gorge,
frivolous games
but they sustained me like water,
they, and the is-ful ah!-nesses of things.
Born in 1938, Les Murray is earning a reputation as one of the most important writers in English today. From the emu to the bulldozer to the powerline, he celebrates everything. Page after page, like a more musical, more comprehensive Elizabeth Bishop, Murray demonstrates his love of precise detail, his curiosity, his embrace of the physical world. “Bounty” is the right word for this beautifully produced book. Don’t wait for the paperback. We not only ought to know his work, we need to know it.
Robert Lowell’s “Epilogue” concludes with a recognition of mortality:
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
Like Lowell, the five poets considered here do more than simply “name”—they bring to life their varied worlds with a strength not only visual but cerebral. Their work is intellectually curious, informed, and even, in a way, philosophical. It displays a quality of mind that dares to risk, and that may be what so much American poetry lacks at the moment. With our own anti-elitist tradition, we may have devalued the mind and its essential role. These five poets resist stark realism, turgid confessionalism, formulaic “deep” imagery, and ecological cant. In their individual voices, the recalled and the imagined become one.