Today her things are quiet
and do not reproach,
each in its place,
washed in the light
that encouraged the Dutch
to paint objects as though
they were grace—
the bowl, the
goblet, the vase
from Delft—each
the reliquary
of itself.
I’ve quoted these poems whole, because Ryan is not a good poet of parts. You have to read her slowly, if you’re to read her at all—the line breaks and rhymes remind you that patience is a virtue (not that most readers are virtuous these days). Some of her poems, I admit, are tiresome, washed with prim sentiment, plummily self-satisfied—Ryan can seem a one-trick pony. I don’t want to make large claims for her, because she’s a minor poet of a rare and agreeable sort. Her best work sits there meekly, tender but askew (practicing the “oiled motions / of avoidance”), hardly daring to ask the reader’s attention. In a time of immodesty, when overgrown monsters stalk the earth, perhaps modesty should have its day.
Mark Doty
Late in the life of a television show, there comes the hour when the writers, having flat run out of ideas, invent some desperate turn of plot or bizarre coincidence, after which the show is never the same. This is called “jumping the shark,” after a gruesomely unlikely episode of the sit-com Happy Days; and for some critics it registers the moment when the willing suspension of disbelief loses its will. I hadn’t thought about its bearing on poetry until, reading Mark Doty’s School of the Arts, I found myself in the middle of a poem about an ultrasound exam of his dog, a poem whose style would have been over-the-top describing the Passion:
No chartable harmony,
less anatomy than a storm
of pinpoints subtler than stars.
Where does a bark upspool
from the quick,
a baritone swell
past the sounding chambers?
If the phrase “jumping the shark” weren’t so good, I’d propose that in poetry such a moment be christened “ultrasounding the dog.”
As they age, poets are more willing to smuggle into their work the humdrum events of their lives—in high art, you get The Pisan Cantos; in low, the ultrasound of a dog. Mark Doty has never been shy about the tragedies of his life; but his recent books have forgotten that poetry needs to be shaped, that the mere mortal record of life’s ups and downs is not art. The poems in his new book sometimes sound like one side of a cell-phone conversation about people you don’t know, will never meet, and don’t give a hoot about. Or they’re about dogs.
I’ve never met a dog I didn’t like, but Doty makes me reconsider. There are half a dozen poems here about his dogs (which he calls, unbearably, “Time’s children”), and I began to cringe every time one of the poor mutts appeared. Doty has always been a sucker for sentiment, and there’s no crime in going all gooey over your pets—I just wish he wouldn’t write poems about them. There’s a poem about a dog so old it can’t climb stairs and sits at the bottom whimpering. There’s a fable about dogs writing a letter to God to protest the way they’re treated. (I’m not inventing this.) It’s an origin myth to explain why dogs sniff each other’s asses—guess where the dog messenger has hidden the letter.
Doty invokes high art on occasion; but, if he mentions Mrs. Dalloway, he takes us to a movie set where a crew is filming Michael Cunningham’s homage The Hours, not Woolf’s novel. Doty is no slouch at the symbolic possibilities of pinchbeck; but a poem about a movie of a book that adopts the characters of another book leaves us very distant from life (like a footnote to a footnote to Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”). This cozy world, everything a shadow or reflection of something else (“beautiful versions … no more false than they are true”), is all the cozier for being set in Doty’s neighborhood, cozier still when he makes sure we know the novelist is a close friend. And, of course, the dogs come trotting out, too.
There ought to be a certain resistance in the subjects a poet chooses; but Doty now grabs his subjects right off the shelf and his attitudes from the bargain bin. (A laggardly ten pages are required to memorialize two friends in a lot of scatty philosophizing and stray quotations from Lucien Freud’s notebooks.) Some poets suffer the delusion, later in their careers, that they can make a poem out of anything (it takes a Kurt Schwitters to make art from the gutter). When they think they are using their materials, the materials are just using them.
Few poems in this volume trouble the surface of this courtly, complacent life; but a sequence about masochistic sex, in which submission is sought and vulnerability gained, turns uneasy and even unpleasant. Parts of it rise toward the cheesy transcendence that makes Doty seem a pitchman for the human potential movement (one poem describes a boy being massaged as the “corpus of our Lord / still nailed to his cross”); yet the poems recognize, here and there, the seeming heartlessness of that sexual subculture, the invited pain, the loveless need of release. Then it’s back to an epiphany every thirty seconds and transcendence by the hour, as if all you needed for revelation were to trot down to the Jiffy Lube.
If I were a sunflower I would be
the branching kind,
my many faces held out
in all directions, all attention,
awake to any golden
incident descending;
drinking in the world
with my myriads of heads,
I’d be my looking.
This isn’t just embarrassing. This is the new theme for Sesame Street.
Doty can still be a sweet and gorgeous writer, one who sees the Poundian glamour of things: “All smolder and oxblood, / these flowerheads, / flames of August: // fierce bronze, / or murky rose, / petals concluded in gold.” As the silly and inane poems pile up, however—on a photo shoot (of him), on mnemonic devices for remembering gym-lock combinations—self-indulgence seems its own passion, affirmation its own disease.
Jack Gilbert
There are poets reluctant to write and poets reluctant to publish, and Jack Gilbert is a little of both. His first book, Views of Jeopardy (1962), won the Yale Younger Poets award; but in the following decades he published only two others. If you can trust the articles that accompanied publication of his new book, Refusing Heaven, the manuscript had to be pried from his fingers. Many poets publish far too much; but, in the long run, the longest of runs, the niggardly turtle probably has the advantage over the profligate hare—he leaves less junk for the future’s derision. (If you think this doesn’t matter, consider how high Kipling’s standing might be if he’d been more circumspect.)
Gilbert’s prosy, cheerless sentences pile up in patient suffering, suffering that prides itself on being without pity or delusion (which means it’s riven with self-pity and self-delusion). One of the pleasures of his work is that the pathos is cut with masochism—you feel he couldn’t write so much about misery without a taste for it, and like many miserable people he writes about laughter in ways that make you want to weep:
There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world.
I had to check the cover of the book to be sure this hadn’t come from a self-help handbook or an old Jonathan Edwards sermon. Gilbert’s sorrows require more than a little preaching, though even the desert fathers entered into more-miserable-than-thou competitions.
Gilbert, who came of age among the Beats in San Francisco, fled the poetry world for a reclusive, peripatetic life, one interrupted by long romances. Most poets are either a man
’s man or a woman’s man (though Byron was perhaps both), and for Gilbert the world is a world of women. (The poems make him seem the last man standing. If you subtract the Greek gods and various poets and novelists, there’s hardly another man in sight—Hannibal isn’t exactly competition.) Gilbert has had three great loves. One of his wives died young of cancer, two decades ago; his poems indulge in the consoling passions of memory—and the consoling negations of grief. Yet the memories too often seem thumbed over, his love a kind of knight-errant narcissism: “We are allowed / women so we can get into bed with the Lord, / however partial and momentary that is.”
Gilbert is a curiously parsimonious poet, loving abstraction the way some misers prefer bonds to cold cash—parsimony is often meanness of spirit, whatever the dividends. With age he has grown crafty and codgerlike, scorning, not just the siren songs of the poetry world (which make most good poets pour wax into their ears, if not molten lead), but the siren songs of words themselves. He sets them down grudgingly but obsessively, so even longer poems tend to be flavorless and bureaucratic (he’s a clam-tongued parson with a Richardson novel somewhere inside him). If you drop a hat, he’ll launch into a lecture:
Poetry registers
feelings, delights and passion, but the best searches
out what is beyond pleasure, is outside process.
Not the passion so much as what the fervor can be
an ingress to. Poetry fishes us to find a world
part by part, as the photograph interrupts the flux
to give us time to see each thing separate and enough.
The poem chooses part of our endless flowing forward
to know its merit with attention.
This is duller than a freshman aesthetics textbook, with a metaphor so clumsy (“Poetry fishes us”) you wonder if it wasn’t ghost-written by an ad copywriter.
The poems in Refusing Heaven spill out, full of their own rectitude but often haggard and marooned—they’re gloomy, tarnished fragments of some lost silvery life. Beyond the pissing and moaning, the endless refresher courses in self-pity, lies an old man facing death, clawing over his past and, despite the lip service to stoic resignation, absolutely terrified. His poems are interesting, not for the honesties they intend, but for the ones they conceal.
Geoffrey Hill
On Michaelmas night of 1634, the Earl of Bridgewater’s children and their music teacher presented a candlelit masque at Ludlow Castle. It was probably the composer Henry Lawes, that teacher, who asked a young poet of their acquaintance to provide the verse. Only a couple of years removed from Cambridge, not yet twenty-five, entirely unknown as a poet except among close friends, the young man was John Milton. Geoffrey Hill’s Scenes from Comus is a typically complex, crabbed, benighted, and frequently bewildering meditation on this strange allegorical entertainment.
In his late age, Hill’s work has too often become a frustrating cacophony of fabulous and tedious monologues—a welter of howls, of the pained protestations of the damned. It used to be that, if you worked away patiently at a Hill poem, it would yield its beauties. Some lay temptingly on the surface, where they lie still; but the matter of the poem was often hidden in allusion or obscure fact (and obscurer wit). In his recent poems, the spillage of bile and mechanic observation by a lamely joking observer has left a reader bankrupted by the labor required to understand them. (Not surprisingly, Hill now lacks an American publisher.)
In Scenes from Comus (dedicated to his friend the composer Hugh Wood, whose symphonic cantata of that title was written forty years ago), an anguished calm has settled upon this frequently unsettled poet. The coarse asides and annoying mannerisms have been chastened if not subdued, the language has become less resistant, the bullying marks of punctuation less frequently indulged (in his Hopkins phase, Hill wants to sit at the reader’s shoulder and rap time with a ruler, which is foolish but not criminal).
Hill is meditating here on character, on license and chastity, on the “covenants with language” that have inspired him to imperturbable obscurity, since public speech so often caters to emollient lies. Milton’s Comus is a magician, a goatish enchanter who can turn men half into beasts (his mother was Circe)—he might easily be seen, like Prospero, as the poet’s alter ego. The thematic strain of Milton’s closet drama is chastity threatened and preserved: a lady is captured by the enchanter, who binds her with a spell. Hill’s meditation is scouring but tangential—the poem touches most tellingly on the alchemy of sexual love and, perhaps, on the chastity required when two lovers live at a distance. (It is no secret that Hill lives in Boston, while his wife, a librettist, serves as curate in an English church.)
One of many clues to this dark poem comes from Hill’s quotation of a phrase (“not in these noises”) from Milton’s description of his early reading, which included
the divine volumes of Plato, and his equal Xenophon: where, if I should tell ye what I learnt of chastity and love, … whose charming cup is only virtue, which she bears in her hand to those who are worthy (the rest are cheated with a thick intoxicating potion, which a certain sorceress, the abuser of love’s name, carries about) …, it might be worth your listening, Readers.
Hill ranges widely around “licence and exorbitance, of scheme / and fidelity; of custom and want of custom; / of dissimulation; of envy // and detraction.” A good part of the poem takes place in Reykjavik, for reasons that remain mysterious. Hill expects his readers to be familiar with Hallgrimur Petursson (a priest whose Passion hymns are among the beauties of Icelandic poetry), and brennivin (Iceland’s favorite alcohol, made from scorched potatoes), and gutta serena (the form of blindness from which Milton suffered), and Comus itself, or at least to spend the time looking them up. (If he tries to look up “titagrams,” however, he’ll be plumb out of luck—could these be the same as strip-o-grams?)
A woman asked Browning, so goes the anecdote, probably apocryphal, what he meant by a certain knotted passage in Sordello. “Madame,” he replied, “when I wrote that only God and I knew what it meant. Now only God knows.” (Carlyle said that after reading the poem his wife didn’t know “whether ‘Sordello’ was a man, or a city, or a book.”) Some of poetry’s obscurities may be recondite clue-mongering, perhaps; but most are a lively demand upon the reader’s intelligence and an entrance to those dark realms where literature does its work. I don’t say Hill always knows the difference; but he is an old-style modernist, whose style is didactic when it isn’t simply hectoring, who still believes that poetry might be a machine for making the reader think. And he is capable of passages of stirring beauty:
While the height-challenged sun fades, clouds become
as black-barren as lava, wholly motionless,
not an ashen wisp out of place, while the sun fades.
While the sun fades its fields glow with dark poppies.
Some plenary hand spreads out, to flaunt an end,
old gold imperial colours.
The English landscape haunted by the past is an exemplary check to Hill’s splenetic pride. It will take long critical reflection for readers to come to terms with this obdurate poem, but Scenes from Comus shows the valedictory temper and devious revelry of the most brilliant and irritating poet we have. Besides, how often will you read a book with a blurb by the archbishop of Canterbury?
Verse Chronicle
Victoria’s Secret
Seamus Heaney
Last year a Dublin literary magazine sponsored an open competition for the best Seamus Heaney imitation. The winning poem began,
Niall FitzDuff brought a jar
of crab apple jelly
made from crabs off the tree
that grew at Duff ’s Corner—
still grows at Duff ’s Corner—
a tree I never once saw
with crab apples on it.
This would be hilarious, if Heaney hadn’t written it himself (I was kidding about the competition, though surely he would win). At sixty-seven, his Nobel dusty on the she
lf, Heaney is old enough and honored enough not to have to impress anyone. He’s so full of genial sanity and sly little tricks with syntax (no one since Shakespeare has been shiftier at manipulating the sequence of tenses), it’s easy to be gulled by his calloused facility.
The poems in District and Circle (the names of overlapping London Underground lines) sometimes take up the subjects of poems from twenty or thirty years ago. You go through the book thinking, Oh, there’s the Tollund Man again, and there’s Glanmore, and there’s the Underground—you’d be forgiven for thinking this a Seamus Heaney greatest hits collection. He’s still a poet of wood smoke and heather, imbued with the Irish past, a sucker for every hand tool and stove lid that comes his way—he goes into a swoon over farm machinery the way Auden did over coal mines. Heaney will make a poem, as Frost and Hardy could, from something seen out of the corner of his eye; he gives you an Ireland where the ancient flows beneath the leaf litter of the modern. When critics say he’s the best Irish poet since Yeats (I’ve said it, too), they mean there hasn’t been an Irish poet as full of blarney and yet so honestly brilliant at being himself.
And yet. And yet! The verse in this new book is sloppy and casual, the poet running through his routines with great skill—but they are routines, without the routine magic he once brought (whatever’s at stake in these poems, it’s much less than two decades ago). It’s a good day when he drags out the poetry engine and cranks it up; but I’m not sure the old Heaney would have settled for lines as fumbling as “Like a scorch of flame, his quid-spurt fulgent” or “But if kale meant admonition, a harrow-pin / Was correction’s veriest unit.” (Veriest unit!) Heaney has done a lot to smuggle Irish dialect into the emollient diplomacies of British English; but the new poems sometimes sound as if he were still translating Beowulf.
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