Hass wants to say the unsayable; yet his poems imply that happiness must always be guilty, because someone somewhere is dying. (The cynic would say that, if someone somewhere is dead, someone else must be happy.) Hass’s poems are often novel in conception, full of wrenching juxtapositions for which the term discordia concors might have been coined—after a while, though, you recognize that he possesses a rigid set of mannerisms: if he mentions poetry, it’s to belabor the self-consciousness of it; if a woman, to spring into bed with her (there’s a lot of heavy breathing in this book); if war, to condemn the inhumanity of it. No one would deny him his tastes, but why does he think they’re in any way remarkable?
The most disturbing poems in Time and Materials are prosy narratives:
When I was a child my father every morning—
Some mornings, for a time, when I was ten or so,
My father gave my mother a drug called antabuse.
It makes you sick if you drink alcohol.
They were little yellow pills. He ground them
In a glass, dissolved them in water, handed her
The glass and watched her closely while she drank.
It was the late nineteen-forties, a time,
A social world, in which the men got up
And went to work, leaving the women with the children.
This is cruel, even excruciating, though Hass seems to believe his readers so doltish they know nothing about families in the 1940s. The father here is a vague figure full of phony bonhomie; but, just when the poet might say a word about his mother’s drunken benders, he calls up the scene of Aeneas escaping the flames of Troy with his father astride his shoulders (he’s a burden, see). Then:
Slumped in a bathrobe, penitent and biddable,
My mother at the kitchen table gagged and drank,
Drank and gagged. We get our first moral idea
About the world—about justice and power,
Gender and the order of things—from somewhere.
And that’s the end. Justice and power? Gender? What was a harrowing family portrait finishes as a lecture on gender. There’s no pity for the father, guilty of that terrible crime, not wanting to leave his young son with a lush.
Poetry, for Hass, has increasingly become a conscienced prose, but not necessarily good prose—the syntax is often wobbly; you’d pay a ransom for a few semicolons; some of the modifiers dangle until hell freezes over; and, when the poet attempts to distinguish between O! and Oh!, he botches it. Hass is too clever and dry a writer for the “poetry of witness,” that most deadly of contemporary genres—instead he writes the “poetry of lecture.” A long poem called “State of the Planet,” commissioned by a famous observatory, starts with one of his gorgeous pastoral set-pieces:
Through blurred glass
Gusts of a Pacific storm rocking a huge, shank-needled
Himalayan cedar. Under it a Japanese plum
Throws off a vertical cascade of leaves the color
Of skinned copper.
Soon, however, he’s droning on about chlorofluorocarbons; by the time he’s done preaching about the destruction of the ozone layer, you’re counting the tiles on the floor. One poem offers a potted history of aerial bombardment in Vietnam; another, a sandbox account of the Korean War. The facts are numbing, but they’re too eager to become parables. Most people learned these things in tenth-grade textbooks, or from Al Gore.
Hass’s taste for Horatian state-of-the-nation poems too easily becomes moral hectoring—after all the idealism, you long for a little Realpolitik. It’s one thing to be nervous about what the lyric ignores, another to blame poetry for the horrors of the world. These poems of genial guilt overwhelm poems far more intriguing: a Pinteresque conversation between lovers, a tale about watching a thirties movie with the sound off, or the many lavish poems about eating (though Hass can’t devour a piece of Parma ham without letting the reader know that somewhere a city is getting sacked—food all too often makes him think of mass murder). In these new poems, you get rueful intelligence by the bucketful, a welcome suspicion about the nature of language, and stunning renderings of the natural world, as well as a lot of scolding. I doubt I’ll like a book of American poetry better all year; but it’s a pity Hass has become a lyric poet with a conscience, because he can’t make the conscience shut up.
Verse Chronicle
Valentine’s Day Massacre
Ted Kooser
Back in 1986, Ted Kooser wrote a poem for Valentine’s Day, printed it up on a postcard, and sent it to women he knew. He did this the next year, and the next, adding a name or two, each year shipping the cards over to Valentine, Nebraska, for the postmark. After two decades of this sweet, facetious nonsense, he decided to call it quits—by then the mailing list had grown to twenty-six hundred names, and the printing and postage exceeded the annual budget of Omaha. Valentines collects these poems, pieced out with black-and-white drawings of farmhouses, prairie landscapes, and an alarming number of dead trees. Perhaps they’re just waiting for spring; but it does seem odd to illustrate a book of love poems with a lot of leafless shrubbery.
Joseph Brodsky wrote a poem every year at Christmas; more poets might adopt a holiday, preferably an obscure one like Liberty Tree Day or National Mustard Day, commemorating it year by year until they have a tidy chapbook. It would keep a lot of poets out of trouble, at least until the holidays ran out. Valentines would have made a wonderful book had the poems been any good.
If this comes creased and creased again and soiled
as if I’d opened it a thousand times
to see if what I’d written here was right,
it’s all because I looked too long for you
to put it in your pocket.
This, you can’t help but feel, is what most people want poetry to be. A poem should be like a greeting card—with a point so blindingly obvious that reading it is like getting hit by a lead pipe. The poem should tell a little joke, perhaps shout Ba-da-boom! and skip offstage. If it can’t make a joke, it should try to squeeze out a few cheap tears.
If you feel sorry for yourself
this Valentine’s Day, think of
the dozens of little paper poppies
left in the box when the last
of the candy is gone, how they
must feel, dried out and brown
in their sad old heart-shaped box.
Well, you say, as you sit around the pot-bellied stove, I bet them paper wrappers don’t feel too good, now, do they? (I’d be sorrier for those discarded wrappings if the poet didn’t go on to write that there’s “not even / one pimpled nose to root and snort / through their delicate pot pourri.”)
Kooser must have been told that poems have musical language, because at times he tries out a jingly phrase (“high in the chaffy, taffy-colored haze”). He must have heard somewhere that poems use metaphors, because he tosses a few in, higgledy-piggledy: “those solemn Sunday / sacraments of Clorox in the church / of starch” or, considering some refrigerated celery, “Surely it misses those long fly balls of light / its leaves once leapt to catch.” Technique doesn’t matter much to a poet whose versified prose, sometimes beaten out on a bongo drum, is used mainly to say something whimsical or twinkly. The poems are short (they had to be short to fit on a postcard) and uplifting, though they don’t have a lot to lift and don’t try to lift a lot.
What’s curious about Valentines is how vacant and insipid the poems are. Surely a poet who sets himself up writing love poems ought to have suffered a passion or two; yet the language is as generic as a pair of blue jeans. Just when you think the poet might be making a point, he begins to gush; and then it’s sentiment all the way down, enough to fill a lard bucket. If you want poems of thwarted love, try Hardy. If you want passion, read Donne. Valentines is the sort of gift book you’d buy for your sweetheart if you had no imagination but somehow knew that, on Valentine’s Day, women like flowers, and chocolate, and … and poetry. Should you be too cheap for the first
two, poetry would have to do.
In the House of Fame, there’s no doubt a broom closet for Ted Kooser. Such a poet won’t ruin poetry—if poetry can survive Jimmy Stewart and Jimmy Carter, it can survive anything. Kooser lives on borrowed capital, in this case the capital accrued by Robert Frost. Frost was a complicated man, so complicated that sometimes he tried to seem simple—he contained as many multitudes as Whitman, and perhaps a few more. Most Frost imitators have tried to get away with just being simple. Frost’s backwoods manner was too good to be true, but not too true to be good; when he said something wise, often it was wise. Kooser rarely says anything wiser than a wisecrack.
Just when I thought that Kooser didn’t have a brain in his head, however, he surprised me. The last poem in the book, written for his wife, has all the fierce, stubborn Frost-like humor the rest of the volume lacks.
The hog-nosed snake, when playing dead,
Lets its tongue loll out of its ugly head.
It lies on its back as stiff as a stick;
If you flip it over it’ll flip back quick.
If I seem dead when you awake,
Just flip me once, like the hog-nosed snake.
There might be life in the old snake yet.
Melissa Green
Twenty years back, Melissa Green published a striking debut volume, The Squanicook Eclogues, and then more or less vanished. Full of gorgeous detail, blowsy with observation, the verse flaunted the giddy excesses of a young poet coming to terms with her talent. Then there was silence, apart from a scarifying memoir on mental illness more than a decade ago.
Last fall Green reappeared in a quiet way, publishing a limited-edition chapbook that quickly sold out. The poems in Fifty-Two, each consisting of six lines, are abrupt, hard bitten, and revealing in a discomfiting way. They have little of the appetite of her early work; some terrible nemesis changed her life and altered—indeed, for a time almost destroyed—her gift.
I was lovely once. The semester I was twenty-eight.
After, scalpel-thin, my shocked soul shut down. A century, a hundred pounds later,
I woke. Why do my roses bloat into bud, blush, die unopened?
The landscapes and gardens once splashily decorative now torment her with loss. The eclogues have become elegies.
The form Green has chosen might easily have gone unrequited. Of the half-dozen lines, the third and fourth are always half lines, with a sharp pause or breach between, the other lines long and prosy. This broke-back stanza rewards the snapshot, the intake of breath—the poems are cuttings, postscripts, musings that must be spoken with purse-lipped brevity. They exist in a world of Greek gods, the Old Testament, and fine art:
Paul César Helleu used to borrow pen nibs from his friend Singer Sargent and do dry point portraits of society women in the belle epoque. One inexplicably turned up in our cellar.
I live in a big black house.
Whoever heard of a black house ? I ought to laugh—and sometimes do.
Helleu was an artist who outlived his time. The tone here moves quickly, deliciously, through matter-of-fact narrative, mild surprise, self-mockery, solemnity—are we to take the black house as fact and symbol both, house and the house of plague? Is the self-portrait meant to be dry as drypoint? Does the beauty of the society women make more cruel the poet’s loss of beauty? From such tentative, teasing amputations are these poems made.
The most explicit poems, those that confront her severe depression, are the most shocking, but also the most familiar. After Plath, after Sexton, there’s only so much ground to cover when a poet says, “I forgot to let myself be loved” or “Someone else is living the life I thought I’d get.” (Men often recount their bouts of madness in a robust and even jocular way, as if they’d been off stalking a lion. Women tend to be braver in their bereavements, and more honest.) The stark revelations, though they verge on self-pity, are merciless:
The latest in a series of sunset-colored dogs,
our tall sons, their stair-step children stamping off snow, the holiday table groaning
with our work: vegetables, poetry, merriment.
It never happened, the house, the oeuvre,
the husband holding me, older. Illness married me.
This is a poet learning to make art of her losses but finding that the loss remains despite the art.
Fifty-Two is a difficult book, often unappealing, at times overwritten (“Raise, oh lift me from this barrow. / Breathe into me a flux of wonder. Rinse my phosphorescent palms and kiss.”) The tone and diction veer wildly from pre-Raphaelite fustian to the delirious slang of “fuck-me pumps”—in one poem the flaying of Marsyas gives way to “I want flamenco, / two beaded McEwan’s Ales, a friendly fuck.” It’s no surprise that the Metamorphoses sustains this poet—she calls herself a “middle-aged Daphne caught in Dante’s silvery, arthritic, suicidal wood.”
This book of barely three hundred lines is a relief from the stultifying manners of contemporary verse, even if writing offers only a secondhand salvation:
A fusillade of blossoms blows from the sour plum, a siege of horizontal hail riddles the garden’s infantry dense with bleeding hearts, the lilac bush hammered by the east wind into a scythe.
These rueful, damaged poems present the uncomfortable portrait of a woman who has been to the edge.
Elizabeth Spires
Elizabeth Spires is in love with ordinary things. The best poems in The Wave-Maker, her sixth volume, are quiet, unprepossessing, filled with wonder at the mortalities and fleeting beauties of the world. Like many connoisseurs of the small, she tries to make the familiar unfamiliar again, as it was for those innocents in the Garden of Eden.
There was intricate machinery involved & a powerful desire to make it all move. It had been easy then to stand waist-deep in the waves & will the world into existence, sea, sky, & cloud, the ever-changing elements, moving & robed, like characters on a stage delivering their lines. Or so she had thought at the time.
Spires never tries to overwhelm the reader—she has placed herself in the tradition of Elizabeth Bishop, whose faux innocence she has shamelessly borrowed. We are so used to our makeshift world, at times it takes a scientist of happenstance to see anything unusual there. Yet while contenting herself with the homely fact, no less transcendent for being true, this poet lives in the dangerous intersection of religion, linguistic tact, and the bald-faced lie. It makes poetry no more morally abrupt if you call religion philosophy.
Spires is never afraid of abstractions (she’s rare in being able to write abstractly without sounding ridiculous); her poems consider the degradations of age, the loss of beauty, the shadows rising slowly around her.
The road is dust,
and the town is dust,
and even my mother
is dust. But here,
set back among the pines,
a teahouse long and low
where we sit like ancients,
cradling lacquered cups.
Outside, the storm of afternoon.
The dust of existence.
Then the storm passes.
The bamboo shines.
The simple lines, effortlessly compact, have abraded some of the verbs into nothingness. This confident elegance suffers a shimmer of doubt at that shining bamboo, as if there the poet wanted too desperately to affect the reader. Soon a cherry tree blooms, autumn is blazing, and the poem collapses into a chummy plea for sympathy: “My friend, sit with me / for a little while. / Let us cleanse ourselves / of the dust of existence.”
These shy, religiously tinged meditations often stop in the middle of an ordinary day to ask questions (Spires’s question marks are more unnerving than her exclamation points, of which there is a bumper crop). The poems show how much can be written from nothing, without the jazzed-up heartiness of a Frank O’Hara, so concerned with trivia he misses the moments between incidents when life takes place. Spires’s poems are loveliest in the mildness of their ambitions. She looks at a snail (she may be more
interested in snails than even snails are), or a fish, or an insect, or perhaps just stares out a window—at times you wish she’d get out a little more. Not much happens, and not much is meant to happen except a woman coming to terms with herself.
Spires once kept her sentimental side in delicate balance with the brooding skeptic, but the sentiment has begun to win out. Her new poems are often infiltrated by the magical awe of children’s tales, tales where anything might happen and, alas, anything does, tales where you can suffer only so much innocence before you want to push the poet into an oven and bake her the way the witch should have baked Hansel.
Sometimes I cannot bear the world
the beauty & perfection of a snail created
by the same Creator who created me
It’s hard to feel such things, but even harder to make poetry of them. When Spires contemplates the mute world, the poems suffer from their selfconscious soulfulness. What might have been the rage of natural history becomes something closer to prayer, without the haunted bearing of religious supplication. As she writes of Advent, “We felt its approach, / peered like curious children / into the bright cave // where the miracle happened.”
Like Bishop, like Moore, Spires has the courage of her modesty, which is no less than faith in her procedure (she lacks Bishop’s cheerful apprehensions and Moore’s disarticulating eye, the eye of a taxidermist); yet it’s often in the depths of technique that her poems break down—they are winsome rather than unbearable. There’s a struggle in her soul between a conventional poetry of superficial instinct and a darker one more wounded, more unlikely, more indomitable.
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