FOR THE PAST WEEK, I’ve seemed—even to myself—to be against everything. Well, not quite everything, but a lot more than usual. I’ve been against little things: the way you can never—ever—get a real human on the phone when a company has voice mail; the people who don’t like the color of the new lampposts where I work; the way the bank can’t give me an answer because the computer is down; a student who told me to please print my comments on his papers because he can’t read cursive. I’ve been against bigger things: the other side of the “argument” I’ve had with a university press about “gender neutral” language; the fact that not one of my students has read, or will be asked to read, Moby-Dick; the rudeness that has crept into ordinary conversations. And I’ve been against really important things: lying under oath; our country’s failure to act when innocent people are being massacred in Kosovo. It’s not that I’m going through a cantankerous period; I’ve been a bit cantankerous all of my life. But the accumulated effrontery of contemporary life seems to have caught up with me.
In all of this, I have realized something about the nature of being against. In most instances, it implies something else I am for. I have a position—one I’ve come to through thought and contemplation—so that I cannot remain neutral (though if I didn’t really quite like those bright red lampposts, I might be neutral in that small battle). The quality of opposition presupposes an alternative—except concerning things so awful you have no idea what to do, and even then you have an option of speaking out. “Against” is not always contrary. Sometimes it’s truly resistant, sometimes only pointing up a contrast, sometimes, even, in anticipation of . . . and it’s occurred to me that all this is not unrelated to art, including poetry. Being “against” is, after all, one mindset out of which art gets made. And I don’t just mean subversive, political art, but the kind of art that defines itself as necessary precisely because it views itself as an antidote to the tired, the outmoded, the superficial, the false. The kind of art—and the kind of criticism—that is, in its own right, an alternative.
Mary Karr offers both art and criticism. At the end of Viper Rum, her third collection of poetry, is a twenty-three-page critical essay on the aesthetics of contemporary poetry. Entitled “Against Decoration,” this courageous and provocative essay first appeared in Parnassus. That such an essay could be termed “courageous” says something of the state of the art of criticism. By all rights, “Against Decoration” should be part of an ongoing dialogue, one more challenging voice in a vigorous larger discussion. Instead, it proffers a somewhat lonely sanity, asking the hard questions that others have seemed content to leave unasked.
Anyone who has read Karr’s memoir, The Liars’ Club, knows that she does not pull her punches. In “Against Decoration,” she dismantles some of the poems of the “new formalists,” risks criticism by taking on such people as Helen Vendler, Anthony Hecht, and others. Karr pointedly critiques some of the poetic practices (and their practitioners) in the contemporary canon, talking of “the highbrow doily-making that passes for art today.” Referring to Amy Clampitt’s “purple vocabulary” and to the “glib meaninglessness” of John Ashbery and the language poets, Karr examines ornamentation and formalism “as an aesthetic value in and of itself”—and finds it wanting. In addition, she questions Vendler’s enthusiasm for poetry as a kind of academic “game,” a puzzle to be solved. Karr calls for clarity rather than obscurity, depth rather than surface. She wants a poem that does not shy away from its emotions, is not afraid to be memorable, acts as though its content matters.
Indicting much of what she finds to be excessive, even evasive, Karr does not blame individual critics, but rather laments the state of criticism—or the lack thereof. She raises the age-old question of why poets write, and for whom. If too much power has devolved into the hands of too few reviewers, we need to think about venue and about audience. Who reads reviews? If they are only for poets, then why do we not have the lively interchange of ideas that characterized the not-too-distant past? If they are for readers of poetry, why do we hear no murmurs of concurrence, no growls of dissent?
“Against Decoration” is important not only for its message, but for its informed and astute logic. Karr examines the work of the “new formalists” not in the light of free verse, but against other formal poems such as Yeats’s “Easter 1916” or Seamus Heaney’s third sonnet sequence, “Clearances” (The Haw Lantern). In doing so, she exposes the soft belly of large parts of the movement. (At one point, she even pits James Merrill against himself.) And by refusing to equate form per se with a political stance, she interrogates not only the formalists, but Ira Sadoff’s leftist outrage at form itself as well as whole schools of critical theory. No poet writing today should proceed without at least noting Karr’s legitimate misgivings and taking them into account.
Karr’s list of what she is against (obscurity of character, foggy physical world, overuse of meaningless references, metaphors that obscure rather than illuminate, and linguistic excess for no good reason) can be translated into a positive list of what she is for: clarity of character, a strong sense of the physical world, clear references, metaphors that illuminate rather than obscure—and linguistic moves that enhance a poem’s meanings. Referring to what sounds suspiciously like good old-fashioned “authorial intention,” she invites us to explore the reasons for a poet’s choices.
We cannot help reading one book against another, one poem against another, one idea against another. It’s how we make distinctions. So, in exposing others, Mary Karr naturally exposes herself. To include such a challenging “manifesto” at the end of a book of poems is to invite its application to the work at hand. The poems of Viper Rum stand up well under her self-imposed critical scrutiny. Using Karr’s standards of evaluation, it would be safe to say there is very little linguistic excess here. These poems intend to be hard-hitting, toughly iconoclastic, blunt, and unflinching almost to the point of repulsion. If they are excessive at all, they are excessively blunt. They look hard at the effects of alcohol, a failed marriage, an impulse toward suicide and self-destruction. The speaker of the title poem toys with temptation and turns aside. “The Last of the Brooding Miserables” calls up a litany of other deaths:
Lord, you maybe know me best
by my odd laments: My friend
drew the garage door tight,
lay flat on the cold cement
then sucked off the family muffler
to stop the voices in his head.
And Logan stabbed in a fight, and Coleman shot,
and the bright girl who pulled a blade
the width of her own soft throat,
and Tom from the virus and Dad
from drink—Lord, these many-headed
hurts I mind.
Unrelenting, the list unreels a not-so-pretty picture, ending close to home. The intimate voice says “Dad,” refusing to let the reader hide behind the formalities of “my father.” Karr does not recoil from the truth. She goes on to give her reason for compiling the list: “I study each death / hard that death not catch me / unprepared.” Taking its cue from its invocation, the poem ends speaking directly and intimately: “Let me rise // to your unfamiliar light, / love, without which the dying / wouldn’t bother me one whit.” The tone is both prayerful and belligerent until, in a final gesture, the speaker bows her head.
In Viper Rum, Karr returns to the themes that haunted The Liars’ Club—her parents’ drinking and dependence, her sister’s forced and cheerful practicality, her own troubled loving. In her urgent need to claim the life she’s led in its own stark terms, Karr not only faces it head-on, she almost rubs her own face in it. Calling funeral homes “for the best cremation deal” from her father’s hospital room, noting her son in his Dracula cape as her friend phones with news of a cancer diagnosis, remembering the “dead space” only alcohol could fill, recounting the night fears that call up fields of skulls (she knows they’re there—think of “Adolf and Uncle Joe”) that envy the very flesh covering her head, Karr almost hurls these moments at her readers, daring us to avert our gaze. Daring us to ask for decoration, something to redeem the moment, clean it up for public consumption. But Karr refuses. In doing so, she runs the risk of elevating her bluntness to the alternative status of high impoverishment—a dark negative space that forms its own misshapen doily. This rarely happens. Karr’s intelligent—and reasoned—portrayal of life as she knows it shapes the collection.
The poems of Viper Rum may be blunt for bluntness’ sake, but they are not exploitative. Karr stares hard in the face of hard fact. There must be a place in poetry for the honesty that knows what it’s after, and what it’s after here is the tough, gritty, physical world in all its inarticulate confusion. These poems make something of what we’ve been handed, not something of whole cloth. They rip up the Hallmark card and replace it with the difficult, demanding claims of love in an imperfect world. Her ear is part of this. The staccato, onomatopoeic music in the middle of “The Pallbearer,” for example, accentuates, rather than masks, the stark realities of a burial:
The cherrywood cover got pittered with rain,
glossy with swirls in the grain
as with great red rivers risen to flood.
I too was flooded. My eyes brimmed
the green world blurry, though my face stayed flat.
The rhythm of walking took all my thought.
Later the shovels of dirt fell splat
on the cover, and they left a nice mound
like the start of a rose garden.
A hard-won religious impulse runs throughout the collection; any sense of redemption comes after Karr has refused all easy answers. In “The Wife of Jesus Speaks,” an unnamed woman faces Christ’s denial and her own eventual suicide. From hell, she announces herself:
In these rosy caverns, you worship
what you want. I have chosen that time
in time’s initial measure, history’s
virgin parchment, when with his hard
stalk of flesh rocking inside me, I was unwrit.
“Christ’s Passion” opens with a cocky, almost-strident voice (“Sure we’re trained to his suffering, sure / the nine-inch nails, and so forth”) before it gives imaginative space to the nature of the suffering, the taking-on of everyone’s fears and sorrows, the burden of human doubt. And “The Grand Miracle” continues in this vein (“Jesus wound up with his body nailed to a tree— / a torment he practically begged for, / or at least did nothing to stop”), calling his resurrection one of a long line of hoaxes, and then ending with the gospel of the “prospect of love”—a shared space where humans learn to trust in faith and in each other.
For 2000-near years
my tribe has lined up at various altars,
so dumbly I open this mouth for bread and song.
Dumbly. At the heart of the book is the speechless awe at a world that must be taken on faith, the wordless acceptance of someone who has contemplated its opposite—the noisy clamor of death—and come back to make the best of those moments of grace (basketballs swishing through the air at a family picnic, bumper cars at the county fair, a chorus of voices rising in unison) that only this world can give to us.
Writing against decoration, Karr has made her case for the emotive voice, for a poetry of feeling. She has not shunned form; many of her poems find stanzaic structures that enhance their meaning, call subtle attention to slant rhymes and the cadence of spoken voice. Karr has found a form in which she can explore the qualities of language—its sounds and its metaphors—that will lead toward clarity. Her final message—and there is one—is so simple that only simplicity could convey it. “Chosen Blindness” depicts a time when she noticed nothing, not even fields of dandelions gone to seed. She herself had gone to seed, paralyzed by drink, sucking smoke into her lungs, waiting for death to catch her unprepared. That was the past, the chosen blindness. The second section shifts to the present: “Now I go to church. Who’d think it?” The third section ends with mother and son holding a hymnal, matching their voices. Written for her son, the poem attests to her willed survival and the strengths of those people we know to be America’s promise:
My forebears
forbore this way, in company. Bread fed them,
and they had to practice hope to keep
plowing up the Dust Bowl’s
starved earth in rows, year
after fruitless year, till the cotton came back.
To say something this true and this moving in anything but the plainest of language would be to do it—and them—a disservice.
The work of Billy Collins opposes the abstract and the pretentious. His poems, which seem casual compared to Karr’s intense ones, balance humor and emotion; they are lucid, easy to read, amusing and amused. Their complexities lie in their ability to surprise: one thought flows easily into another with humorous good nature until, suddenly, the poem takes an unexpected turn. Picnic, Lightning takes its title from Lolita, in which the young nymphet gives a two-word parenthetical explanation for her mother’s death. Its telescopic combination is both ominous and somehow humorous—one can almost hear her offhand tone—and Collins uses that to establish his own tone in the title poem:
It is possible to be struck by a meteor
or a single-engine plane
while reading in a chair at home.
Safes drop from rooftops
and flatten the odd pedestrian
mostly within the panels of the comics,
but still, we know it is possible . . .
As he shovels compost into a wheelbarrow, he thinks of the ways the body can betray itself so that the “instant hand of Death” becomes the reason for detailed marveling at the soil: “bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco.” Because the combination of picnic and lightning is inherent in everything we do, the thought of death heightens the speaker’s awareness of the things at hand: “Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue, / the clouds a brighter white.” He can hear plants singing, and the “click / of the sundial / as one hour sweeps into the next.”
The click of the sundial is characteristic of Collins’ poetry—the impossible made possible through an imagination that never veers far from reality, but simply reinforces the wonder of the actual. The result is not decoration, but a shaped necessity. The opening poem of Picnic, Lightning, “Fishing on the Susquehanna in July,” with its satisfying rhythms, sets the stage for such incursions into the imagination.
I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna
or on any river for that matter
to be perfectly honest.
Not in July or any month
have I had the pleasure—if it is a pleasure—
of fishing on the Susquehanna.
The nearest he’s come to fishing on the Susquehanna is in a museum in Philadelphia when he contemplated a painting of just such a scene, thinking that was something he was never likely to do. Then he moved on, to other American scenes, to “one of a brown hare / who seemed so wired with alertness / I imagined him springing right out of the frame.” In just this way, the speaker has, in fact, been fishing on the Susquehanna, in July, the blue sky filled with clouds and the trees dense along the banks. And yet Collins has not appropriated the experience; he has remained true to his honest admission of what he did—and did not—do. The poem is not about fishing; it’s about what it is to imagine oneself fishing, about the power of art to transform.
For all his easygoing informality, Collins is not afraid to be moving. He admits to emotion and to the validity of emotion and, beyond that, to the validity of imagined emotion. “I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey’s Version of ‘Three Blind Mice’” completes its thought in the first line—“And I start wondering how they came to be blind.” From there, Collins is off on a riff—wondering at the circumstances that caused them to be blind, wondering how they found each other, wondering about the farmer’s wife, wondering his way right through to dicing an onion which might, just possibly, account for the “wet stinging” in his own eyes although the “mournful trumpet” of Freddie Hubbard isn’t helping. By now, with the help of the music, he’s overcome the cynic in himself and feels real empathy for the sightless creatures “without tails to trail through the moist grass.”
Jazz blows its own ubiquitous trumpet throughout this collection. “Jazz and Nature” manages to fuse the internal and external worlds in one of those exceptional moments when, with Art Pepper’s “speedy, mellow alto / pouring out of two big maples” and a bee driving the speaker indoors, he moves from memory into his own present tense. In a few swift stanzas, the poet progresses from biography to autobiography, from listening to jazz to listening to his inner voice, from a consideration of nature to a contemplation of his small family tree:
the work whose pages are turned
every day like a wheel that is turned by water,
the thing I can never stop writing,
the only book I can never put down.
Jazz also informs poems that are ostensibly about something else, as in “Snow,” where a slow Monk solo becomes the falling snow: “the notes and the spaces accompany / its easy falling / on the geometry of the ground.” The poem turns playful as the poet imagines the composer imagining a winter scene while he sits at the piano, or, in turn, imagines that the music could also go with rain and falling leaves, or, conversely, that the snow could go with “an adagio for strings,” a swirl of thoughts to mirror the fusion of music and weather. In a characteristic gesture, the poem turns serious when you least expect it, so that there is delight in the seriousness and delight that it could come so quickly to alter the mood. Thus the ending of “Snow” is all the more moving for the playfulness that preceded it:
It falls so indifferently
into the spacious white parlor of the world,
if I were sitting here reading
in silence
reading the morning paper
or reading Being and Nothingness,
not even letting the spoon
touch the inside of the cup,
I have a feeling
the snow would even go perfectly with that.
The snow shapes itself to mood, to music, to the perfect title of the book to read in such a snow, to the internal stirrings of the spoon that rests nowhere as the poet’s imagination discovers it ready and waiting, an image that links the parlor of the world with the interior self.
Collins can make you almost laugh out loud while feeling pain, as in his brilliant rewriting of Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts Revisited.” From real Irish cows in a field to reincarnated peacocks, he gives us the benefit of a whimsical mind working over the mundane. But it’s more than that. It’s the precision of language used to surprise with its rightness, enlighten us with its insight. At his best, Collins is seriously funny. For example, “Lines Lost Among Trees” invokes lines that came to him when he couldn’t write them down and which he can’t recall: “They are gone forever, / a handful of coins / dropped through the grate of memory, / along with the ingenious mnemonic // I devised to hold them in place—.” Has ever the limitation of “ingenious” been more clear or more familiar? So Collins in his distinctive voice gives us an elegy for the lost lines:
those six or eight exhalations,
the braided rope of the syntax,
the jazz of the timing,
and the little insight at the end
wagging like the short tail
of a perfectly obedient spaniel . . .
Collins plays against the artificial, usually predictable, self-importance of contemporary poetry. His self-consciousness seems unselfconscious. He handles image with the deftness of a juggler tossing in another ball, catching it effortlessly, integrating it seamlessly into the act. His inventive metaphors illuminate as though the world had been glimpsed in a flash of lightning.
Humor is tricky, especially in poems, and some of these work better than others—though I suspect the list would differ from reader to reader. I’m not as entranced with “Victoria’s Secret” as I am with the wet dogs that will repel people in the future as much as they do in the present (“To a Stranger Born in Some Distant Country Hundreds of Years from Now”), and I’m not as entertained by undressing Emily (“Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes”) as by the oddball facts the poet has found in reading a one-volume encyclopedia from Flannagan to flatheaded to Flavian (“What I Learned Today”).
My personal favorites illuminate not only the world but also a sense of the temporal within it. There is a doubling of time in “I Go Back to the House for a Book.” The speaker returns for something to read in the doctor’s office and, while he’s inside choosing the book, another self goes on without him, always, now, three minutes ahead of any experience the speaker might be about to have: just ahead of him, the perfect double, although less schooled in “the love poems of Ovid.” This playful conceit becomes something profound—that sense of possibility we all know, not presented here as earthshaking, but rather as the quiet choices continually made that in retrospect become the life we have led.
“Lines Composed Over Three Thousand Miles from Tintern Abbey” are also lines composed many years after first reading Wordsworth’s poem. “It was better the first time”—when it was fresh, when the image hadn’t diminished through familiarity, when the body was full of energy, so that now, when “we” (he’s included us all by now) put down the book and sleep, when we wake “a little before dinner,” something will be missing. We will wake older, no longer virgin, noting the slightly acrid aftertaste of relived experience: “Nothing will be as it was / a few hours ago, back in the glorious past / before our naps, back in that Golden Age / that drew to a close sometime shortly after lunch.”
Unfolding like a black-and-white newsreel, “The Death of the Hat” follows the long and distinguished history of hats: “The day war was declared / everyone in the street was wearing a hat.” The poem pivots—“But today we go bareheaded / into the winter streets”—and suddenly the memory of the poet’s father wearing his hat to work every day is coupled with the image of spruce trees wearing “cold white hats of snow” until the poem resolves itself in heartfelt elegy:
And now my father, after a life of work,
wears a hat of earth,
and on top of that,
a lighter one of cloud and sky—a hat of wind.
In unforgettable moments like these, Picnic, Lightning proves again that poetry can be accessible and significant, that perhaps one depends upon the other.
Thylias Moss is, ironically, writing against the written word. Anyone who has heard her read her work is struck by the significant difference between the words as they appear on the page and the words as she performs them. This is the case for most poets, of course, but not to this extent. What usually happens is that the spoken voice of the poet quietly informs our subsequent readings of his or her work; the reader remembers cadence and tone and inflection, and makes subtle adjustments. With Moss, the spoken voice comes alive in Southern Baptist glory—rising at times to chant, to song, to exhortation, falling at others, to whisper, to love-babble, to inarticulate moan.
The question for such a poet, playing simultaneously with the written and the oral tradition, is how to mediate between the two, how to capitalize on the strength of one without overshadowing the other. Through the years, Moss has experimented with a number of ways to indicate her interest in the oral even to the silent reader who has never heard her voice. One has been a kind of syncopated spacing, phrases set off from other phrases, sentences broken open to force the reader to add rhythm, to punctuate with silence or added emphasis. Another has been the long flowing line, a groundswell of sound and cadence to carry the reader along on its current. Still another is the use of repetition, a single phrase repeated (as in a sermon) until it reaches the pitch of urgency. Along with these, Moss has often dealt with biblical subjects so that the very vocabulary and concentrated concern has been that of the church—and, by extension, the pulpit. Her poems are meant to convince, in the way that the oral is meant to convey conviction.
Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler uses all of these techniques—and something more. The poems of this volume do not experiment so much as demonstrate: they announce themselves as full-blown examples of something new. At the same time, they are more than ever written for the page: dense with reference to biblical and classical themes, the colloquial superimposed on the formal, these are poems that must be seen to be heard. On the cover jacket, Harold Bloom calls the book “profound and disturbing”—which it is—and says “its difficulties are necessary and rewarding.” He does not define the difficulties, but I will say they are the difficulties of tackling hard philosophical and ethical choices, not the difficulties of deliberate obfuscation. So if there are places where the sense seems to break down—and there are—then it breaks down into the nonsense of human dilemma.
The title poem is a good example. Moving from fairy tale (Hansel and Gretel) to the contemporary drama of Susan Smith’s decision to send her two young sons strapped in their car seats to the bottom of a lake, it wrestles with such ideas as assisted suicide, infanticide, abortion, and sexual abuse, as well as the more positive concepts of bone marrow transplants and the urgent will to live. Just before death, when the body is most alive, it can give the “Tarzan holler,” that long, wild, nearly human sound that issues from the lungs at birth, at death, at a few untrammeled moments in between. Moss finds a way to delve into the understory:
Susan, I don’t mean to be cruel
but as you know it is inevitable. She
once took the boys on a picnic near water
cool and effervescing with motherhood
that blew bubbles that emerged
from Michael’s right ear when she whispered
in his left, a rummage
of secret disappointments in school, so much
to remember, fix; life imprisoned in ego. Susan
likes Mr Quixotic, psst, pass it on—does not—does too
and wants the time of day from shrugging shoulders,
silhouette
like iron monument in the park.
The ordinariness is betrayed by knowledge. That Smith was a real person, her life, too, filled with pssts, complicates the picture and adds yet another moral dimension. Add to that the fact that to execute her might be to rob a relative of the marrow she needs for survival, and you have a modern-day tragedy. But Moss is not milking the dramatic; she’s exploring it, turning up the stones so that we see what lives underneath, refusing to let us reduce a complex human situation to something as easy as “right” or “wrong.” The narrative moves from direct address to past-tense narration to present tense (albeit locked in the past), and then the syntax, instead of reinforcing idea, begins to work against it. And the oddly reductive lines are so compressed that they will not fully yield up meaning or make an exact equation:
Humperdinck’s
Rubylips, witch, bitch ≈ Gretel, baker, widow-maker
At the heart of Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler is the human body, with its own urgencies. Lactation, defecation, copulation—you name it and Moss has explored its function, its counterpart in nature, its place in our mythologies. She does this with precision, as “Ant Farm” demonstrates: “ . . . such a narrow world it was, pressed between / sheets of Plexiglas no bigger than standard issue composition paper on which / I took notes on their progress that in my notebook never was, for I kept looking / at them from my perspective had I been as restricted; they could not open the world, reach / for stars though their tunnels longed to be telescopes.” But she also explores with imagination—the poem goes on to talk about a number of the 5,000 species of ants, forcing us to see ourselves as she has seen them.
Postmodern in the best sense of the word, engaging the slipperiness of language rather than exploiting it, Moss’s poems move quickly from reference to reference, always circling back to the individual experience, the body as home. The residue is bone, and “Those Who Love Bones” looks at bone as history:
Even after long silences they may be exhumed
and even if the surviving fragment is just a piece of skullcap
no bigger than a nicotine patch, William Maples
still can tell how alligators gnawed it at the bottom
of a river two years after the hatchet man put it there; there’s
a bible of bones in a barn in the former Yugoslavia
5.
and thick as grief around Pol Pot’s feet.
The section numbers interrupt the train of thought, announce that one bone just leads to another, leads to “Hey, Hambone; Hey, Daddy,” leads to how we are all alike under the cover of the skin:
Somewhere out there also: catacombs, decay, decay, half-
lives, promises, a finger on a string to help a more perfect knot
come into being on Wilma’s wedding day, marriage to bone,
faithful, uncompromising truthful bone
—the mind cheats, soft
and dreaming, inventing words bone can’t say, not even a simple
forensics-defying word: race.
This collection takes on too many topics for one review to cover them adequately, and Moss’s informed, curious mind encompasses too much to be roped into any one category or pronouncement. In fact, she suggests that for every idea there will be a counter idea, for every belief a skepticism. So, the religion she presents here is many-faceted. Rooted in the dark angers and the deliberate injustices of the Old Testament where the stories take on the power of myth, it can be traced into the present where “Glory” praises flame, asks God to “burn himself again for the sake of light,” and the poem is charged with instances of fire, given up to the “glory raging”:
I don’t mean to say embrace it, but if it looks when it detonates
like glory, then take no chances, fellowship
with what little colored boys know
lashed and gasolined on the branches, imperfect crosses
with all the limbs intact, the wood undisciplined, the boys
a wild offering and given to God who could use them
since he’s not the God he was in the past when he rejected certain
burnt offerings, clad his favorites in asbestos, outfitted the others
in salt; now he takes whatever he’s given, revision into neuter
in the Oxford inclusive language new testament
without old biases, without tradition, and without passion.
The New Testament may lack passion, but its God has softened somewhat. “A Man” calls to its congregation through its refrain—“he was a man”—until you can almost hear the church resound with Christ’s humanizing presence, until God himself is “more like / what God needs to become, so moves also, / so God moves also // because a man moves.”
“Advice” rejects a former professor’s admonition: “Do not write about the Holocaust / young sable lady: some subjects must be earned / not dreamed.” And “stay out of that region of abjection; / you have misery a-plenty in your zone . . .”
Professor, this poem is not revenge;
it is forgiveness
The poet asserts her right to enter the world of experience and imagination, to add to her “echoes of lamentation” all she knows of man’s inhumanity to man. Thylias Moss may not yet have found the perfect balance between the oral and the written, possibly because her language tries to have it both ways; what comes to life on the tongue can seem at times imprecise on the page. Portions of these poems may remain obscure to any reader. Moss often elides traditional syntax, and sometimes sense, but her objective is evident and, I think, important. She is a poet of many gifts and she produces a poetry that takes risks. Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler is strikingly expansive, especially when read against some of the narrow, self-obsessed or ideologically rigid poetry that is all too prevalent, and the ending of “Advice” indicates that Moss is still evolving:
. . . I will not abandon this poem
that attempts to touch much of what keeps touching me
shaping me into a woman who hopes to finish knowing herself
in time to begin to know something else.
You are ten years dead. It is only a story.
Your story. My story.
Now it has been thirty-five years since Sylvia Plath’s death. In Birthday Letters, Ted Hughes is writing against his own silence. He is also, inevitably, writing against the myth that has grown up surrounding their marriage—a myth fueled by his silence and by those who have appropriated her life to their own causes more than they have honored her poetry.* The first half of the book recapitulates the story of their meeting, their marriage, their first few years of partnership. And the last half explores the hardships and psychological disintegration. By breaking his silence, Hughes invites our natural curiosity—even prurience—and the book will be read as much for its attitudes as for its poetic quality. That is probably appropriate since Hughes clearly is making an effort to tell his side of the story, to give balance where, before, there were only the fires of speculation.
In these eighty-eight poems, Hughes addresses Plath—the “you” that (even when it hovers in the background) is central to each. Her presence is palpable and Hughes speaks directly to her, eradicating the grave even as he often invokes it. The poems are filled with a tragic sense of loss, with anger, with passionate memory, with regret. In other words, they convey the tumult of the marriage and its aftermath—a haunting sense of something uncompleted which these poems, as they rework the events, attempt to piece together. What was incomplete was Hughes’s understanding of the emotional events that were unfurling around him and, by extension, of his part in them.
Birthday Letters is bound to be controversial. It is impossible to read it in any way except against Plath’s Complete Poems. Ten of the poems share a whole or partial title with hers, many refer to places or events that are familiar from her poetry, several use her own lines or phrases (as in “Night-Ride on Ariel,” where bolts of moonlight are “Crackling and dragging their blacks / Over your failing flight”). This technique is not (as some might say) derivative, nor is it thievery. Rather, it creates a sense of dialogue. There are two sides to every story, it says, and these poems, like hers before them, are subjective versions, rife with the metaphor and image of shared existence. Hughes carefully introduces fragments of Plath’s poetry in order to claim that life as much as to establish his own version of it. Plath is everywhere in these new poems—muse, partner, patient. The complex relationship of two great artists is laid bare.
In “The Rabbit Catcher,” clearly the counterpart of Plath’s poem of the same title, he talks of a time when she tore up a snare, clearly an act with which he has no sympathy. Yet the poem asserts both points of view:
The sanctity of a trapline desecrated.
You saw blunt fingers, blood in the cuticles,
Clamped round a blue mug. I saw
Country poverty raising a penny,
Filling a Sunday stewpot. You saw baby-eyed
Strangled innocents, I saw sacred
Ancient custom. You saw snare after snare
And went ahead, riving them from their roots
And flinging them down the wood. I saw you
Ripping up precarious, precious saplings
of my heritage, hard-won concessions
From the hangings and the transportations
To live off the land. You cried: “Murderers!”
There is no way to close the gap. The poem ends with her ability to catch the poem, while he stands outside her imaginative space.
So how do these poems work? It’s impossible to strip them of Plath and substitute another more generic “you” in order to analyze their effectiveness. They rely on specificity of time and place and event. This is important in a dramatic and almost an evidentiary way, for the book’s reason for being is the accumulated weight of memory and insight. Birthday Letters is the product of memory revisited so that each remembered scene is now colored by subsequent knowledge—the face of her suicide:
Till your real target
Hid behind me. Your Daddy,
The god with the smoking gun. For a long time
Vague as mist. I did not even know
I had been hit,
Or that you had gone clean through me—
To bury yourself at last in the heart of the god.
“The Shot”
Hughes’s analysis—if that’s what it is—will probably be called a rationalization. Many of the poems convey a sense that there was nothing he could do, that he was a player in someone else’s drama. In this version, Plath had so completely identified him with the father who died when she was eight that Hughes was destined to fail to meet her needs. In effect, he re-creates “Daddy”—her daring, and deliberate, fusing of the two men. Hughes pounces on this psychology to explain what went wrong: in reviving her father through her poems, she was transferring her anger onto her husband. This may very well be true, and certainly the picture Hughes paints is one her poems could also lead us to suspect: an erratic, vulnerable, brilliant, volatile woman, trapped in a body wracked by hormonal swings—blood driven, moon driven, ecstatic one minute, despairing the next. I wish, though, that Hughes had explored a bit more his own role in the scenario, understanding through hindsight what it must have been to be so bright, so energetic, so creative, so ambitious, and with so unformed a self that the responsibilities of family and finances became unbearable. He lets himself off the hook a little too easily—and lets her off, too, opting for chance over choice:
Sometimes I think
Finally you yourself were two gloves
Worn by those two hands.
Sometimes I even think that I too
Was picked up, a numbness of gloves
Worn by those same hands,
Doing what they needed done, because
The fingerprints inside what I did
And inside your poems and your letters
And inside what you did
Are the same.
“The Hands”
And Plath remains both the woman he first met (lively, engaging, reenergized in memory) and the woman she became in their marriage (uncertain, furious, plagued by memory)—in each case more objectified and observed than internalized and understood. Throughout these poems, Hughes makes some simplified pronouncements that have more the ring of the expected than the surprise of true perception: “We thought they were a windfall. / Never guessed they were a last blessing” (“Daffodils”).
That said, it should be possible to look at Birthday Letters without forgetting to whom the letters are addressed and still assess the project—and the poetry—as art. These are powerful poems, as much for the force of their own vision as for our interest in their subject matter. But there are too many of them and some are better than others. By all rights, these poems should have appeared singly or in small groups over the years, as a record of his sensibility and a chronicle of his grief (though possibly the pressure of silence is the rootstock of this collection).
Birthday Letters gains power at its midpoint, as though Hughes needed to write his alternative “version” before he could begin to write from within his own experience. Every so often, there is a poem with Hughes’s distinctive voice, his raw, animal vision. And every so often he gives himself over to his unique way of seeing the world with his own intuitive imagery. In the end of “Daffodils,” the description of the flowers is wholly his: “Propped their raw butts in bucket water, / Their oval, meaty butts, / And sold them, sevenpence a bunch— // Wind-wounds, spasms from the dark earth. / With their odourless metals, / A flamy purification of the deep grave’s stony cold / As if ice had a breath—.” When this happens, the poems truly do what some of the more deliberate ones do not—they find a deep, communal nerve. However, an earlier version of “Daffodils” (published in Flowers and Insects, 1986) presents the same material, and many of the same lines, in the first-person singular—a fluff of a poem which he may later have plundered in order to wrestle it into his agenda, which hardly makes it the poem his publicists claim was written and tucked away as part of an ongoing grief. This raises crucial questions about the sincerity of the emotions, the art, or both.
As the book gains momentum, Hughes emerges as a character in his own right. I find it interesting to experience Hughes’s America, to see with fresh eyes what are, for most of us, the commonplace images of the country—the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, the vast and terrifying landscapes of the West. And he finds in the sea off Nauset the clean and cleansing fragments of Plath’s past. But I find it even more interesting to watch Hughes watch her as she experiences his England. All his lonely Yorkshire landscapes thrown into question—the rabbit snares, the remains of Elmet, the drab oceanside—everything he loved fodder for her scathing eye, her glittering intelligence. It’s only when his own intelligence matches hers that Birthday Letters comes alive not as psychology but as poetry. Then we taste the Hughes of Crow, the mystical acceptance of a dark Fate that colors the language and the landscape of the heart.
“Epiphany” is the most problematic of such poems. A form of self-interrogation, the poem poses its questions in uncompromising terms. As Hughes tells it, walking over Chalk Farm Bridge on the way to the tube station, he met a man with a fox cub who told him he would sell it for a pound. The poet’s temptation is unmistakable as he describes “eyes reaching out / Trying to catch my eyes.” Retrospectively, the “you” intervenes (at least in his thoughts): “What I was thinking / Was—what would you think? How would we fit it / Into our crate of space?” and thus Hughes reaches a decision: “Then I walked on / As if out of my own life.” The poem could end here, but it doesn’t. Its larger implications are disturbing, possibly because the poem contains a vision of marriage that, in most instances, would doom it to failure:
If I had paid that pound and turned back
To you, with that armful of fox—
If I had grasped that whatever comes with a fox
Is what tests a marriage and proves it a marriage—
I would not have failed the test. Would you have failed it?
But I failed. Our marriage had failed.
Here domesticity and family are set against the feral sense of the self. By turning his back on his own nature, the poet asserts his own needs even as he pronounces judgment on them both. (It’s instructive to remember that “The Thought-Fox,” the opening poem in Hughes’s first collection, The Hawk in the Rain, equates poetry with a lone fox in the wood: “Brilliantly, concentratedly, / Coming about its own business // Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox, / It enters the dark hole of the head.”) As a present-tense retrospection, the “epiphany” rings false. As a fierce statement of individuality, it is powerful and true. A split urge—a wish to be exonerated and a strain of defiance—runs throughout the book. I prefer the defiant.
Perhaps my favorite poem in this collection is “Error.” It blends impulse for a retrospective understanding with insistent, almost archetypal description. Its sounds are packed like a snowball: hard consonants, tongue-twisting alliterations, and off-rhymes mirror the language of the “bundled women” who “Jabbered hedge-bank judgements, a dark-age dialect.” Calling the move to Devon a “wrong fork,” it ends by watching the two of them there, locked in the bubble of the past: “Gazing out of the transparency / At a desolation.” But the penultimate stanza reveals Hughes’s own deep, resurrected love of the land:
The world
Came to an end at bullocks
Huddled behind gates, knee-deep in quag,
Under the huddled, rainy hills. A bellow
Shaking the soaked oak-woods tested the limits.
And, beside the boots, the throbbing gutter—
A thin squandering of blood-water—
Searched for the river and the sea.
Birthday Letters cannot be assessed as poetry only. It is a document at once personal and public. Many people have already made up their minds, and this book won’t change them. But these poems, written against a tide of public opinion, do try to be balanced and fair. They present Hughes himself as young, insecure, and often ineffective. If, when they met, Plath thought of him as a masculine god, he thought of her as from another world, bred to a sophistication and class which he lacked. The result of their union is a legacy of poems whose pain is amplified when they are read together. Poems are richer than biographical fact, and these spring from the inner landscape of a mature poet as well as from this painful part of his life. Birthday Letters adds an elegiac and necessary voice to our understanding.
CODA: Time has a way of melding stories into one: the individual experiences of Romeo and of Juliet emerge as the singular tragedy we know as Romeo and Juliet. In retrospect, and with our knowledge that Hughes knew the nature of his final illness and impeding death, the questions surrounding his decision to publish Birthday Letters are answered. Breaking a long and dignified silence, this book speaks not only to the critics who accused him but to all of us who consider our “story” the story. In the face of death, the particulars are everything—and nothing. Birthday Letters is only one part of a legacy of poetry larger than any single book. As we read it now, we must also consider The Hawk in the Rain, with its elemental authority, and the dozens of subsequent books that forged Hughes’s reputation. In “Fox Hunt,” published in 1970, Hughes envisioned the field ahead in which, like the fox, his talent would roam free: “As I write this down / He runs still fresh, with all his chances before him.” But all foxes are transitory. Perhaps Hughes wrote his own fate in these lines from “The Morning Before Christmas” (1983):
A flood pond, inch-iced, held the moment of a fox
In touch-melted and refrozen dot-prints.
J.K.