GHOSTS, SEX, AND PHYSICS: Devin Johnston & Pattiann Rogers.

Two recent poetry collections offer a range of pleasures.


by Peter Campion and D. H. Tracy
POETRY FOUNDATION SYNDICATE

Aversions, by Devin Johnston. Omnidawn. $14.95.

by Peter Campion

Devin Johnston's second book takes the title of his new collection from the rite that ancient Romans performed to placate their dead. His is a book of hauntings: deceased loved ones, childhood bullies, ancient poets, and ideal selves all ghost these pages at one time or another. But ghosting's not so much the subject matter as the formal method. In poem after poem Johnston turns away from the world at hand and moves into a kind of hushed borderland, even as he redirects our attention to the here and now. Like the filmmaker Stan Brakhage, to whom he pays homage, this poet can't get enough of those seemingly mundane spots in time when some subtle presence arrives, thrumming in over the wires. The image of an audible silence traversing telephone lines appears, in fact, as a central motif in the book.

This is also a book about language itself. Yet there's none of the fashionable reflexiveness you might expect from "a book about language itself," none of the knowing distortions of idiom so many poets employ to disguise the lack of genuine thought. Johnston's linguistic introspection is the real thing. His attention to his medium is part and parcel of his feelingful engagement with those spectral presences. Take the first two stanzas of "Early Spring," his adaptation of Horace's Soracte ode:

The hardest of winters will crack
           at the tap of spring and milder systems:
      performance yachts
           are winched from dry-dock storage;
      chafed by confinement,
           the amateur botanist hates his apartment,
      and city parks no longer shine with frost.


      Venus ascends through the elms
           as the moon swings closer
      and teens entwine
           their fingers as they ramble,
      sandals abandoned; a night-
           shift employee waves her scanner,
      restocking surge suppressors
           of summer lightning.

These lines have a fine acoustic, maintained by a precision and condensation which Basil Bunting or Lorine Niedecker would have admired. These are not "mere" formal talents but vital aspects of Johnston's vision. He sees language as one way that the dead live through us: we receive it from them as we receive our dna. His poems are dignified by deftness and quietude, but they're also great feats of enlargement: they act as conduits, allowing the past and the present to replenish each other. Large also are the pleasures they give their readers.

Peter Campion is the author of a book of poems, Other People, and a monograph on the painter Mitchell Johnson.

© 2007 by Peter Campion. All rights reserved.



Firekeeper: Selected Poems, by Pattiann Rogers. Milkweed Editions. $16.00.

by D.H. Tracy

I picked up the first version of Firekeeper (1994) after coming across Rogers's terrific "Abundance and Satisfaction," a poem cast as a sort of genteel internal debate. Abundance wants a map of the world so detailed it becomes the world; Satisfaction can already see the world in a grain of sand. Satisfaction is monotheistic and content with one explanation; Abundance is polytheistic and wants many. Each makes a good case, and the compromise reached in the poem's rollicking finale has in it the catch-as-catch-can spirit with which we tend in practice to conclude these kinds of arguments with ourselves:

I want one god to be both scatter
and pillar, one to explain simultaneously
mercy and derision, yet a legion of gods
for the spools of confusion and design,
but one god alone to hold me by the waist,
to rumble and quake in my ear, to dance me
round and round, one couple with forty
gods in the heavenly background
with forty violins with one
immortal baton keeping time.

The balance of Rogers's poems (this includes the new selections here from her five books since 1994) come down for Abundance, and busy themselves with praise of the body and nature. These are not narratives of the form, "Yesterday I found a nest in the meadow with three eggs in it, but I returned this morning and there were only two." Rogers offers instead catalogs of phenomena, of animals and animal parts, her interest lying not in their context but in the natural laws that may be apprehended through them, in their implications for their Creator. A single stanza may collect samples of clover, tulips, peabush, steeplebrush, Sweet William, mushrooms, oaks, birches, voles, snails, slugs, crickets, toads, sparrows, larks, and bobolinks. In five lines she might move from pipe fish to musk ox to fungi. In their compulsive taxidermy the poems do not acquaint you with the natural world so much as with the study of it; reading them is like roller-skating through a natural history museum.

Behind Rogers's method, or at least succinctly capturing it, is what she calls "the imperfection of the unfinished," that is, her sense that a being is in its highest and most praiseworthy state when beyond, or considered outside of, change. Discrete events frustrate the writing's aspirations to universality and prayer, and she often uses imperfect tenses to avoid letting in events at all. If moment-to-moment consciousness appears, it is in instances of acute bodily need; as in the work of some other science-oriented nature poets, like Diane Ackerman, the poems extrude an inadvertently terrifying world in which nothing exists but sex and physics.

D.H. Tracy's poetry and criticism appear widely. He lives in Illinois.

© 2007 by D. H. Tracy. All rights reserved.



Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

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GHOSTS, SEX, PHYSICS: J.D. McClatchy & Anne Stevenson.

Two recent poetry collections offer a range of pleasures.


by Peter Campion and D. H. Tracy
POETRY FOUNDATION SYNDICATE

Poets of the Civil War, ed. by J.D. McClatchy. The Library of America. $20.00.

by Peter Campion

The Civil War was our defining tragedy. Most of us know that commonplace. But maybe because it's so obvious, the war can also seem like a blind spot on our collective consciousness. After the atrocities in New York four years ago, the experts on TV kept referring to the War of 1812 as the last conflict in which an American city was attacked. Vicksburg and Atlanta could have been cities on the moon to them. You can see how such reasoning worked. It's easier to discount the suffering a country inflicts on its own. It's easier, especially since this war ended the abomination of slavery, to gloss its horror.

What makes this collection of Civil War poets so valuable is the power with which it disrupts that trend, corroborating William Faulkner's claim that "The past is not dead. It is not even past." It's not necessarily the consistent quality of the work included that gives the anthology its power. (Many of the poems, as their editor openly admits, are second rate; several seem awkward imitations of Milton or Walter Scott.) No, it's the immediacy with which poetry itself confronts us. McClatchy explains in his elegant introduction that, while there remains no "American Iliad," he has set out to create a panorama made up of the partial glimpses that the poems provide.

What does that leave to readers who desire more from poems than historical interest? A good deal. There are six excellent poems by Emily Dickinson, which set an explosive interior drama against their uncharacteristic topicality. The strongest poem in the collection is Walt Whitman's devastating "Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night," and the twenty-six pages of Whitman form the center of the book. Fine work by lesser poets also lends power to the anthology. The disillusioned poems of the Connecticut writer John W. De Forest seem particularly striking to me.

But maybe the most impressive selection is that of Herman Melville. Some of the ornament that Melville could sustain in his muscular prose seems like conventional clunkiness in his poems. But consider "Inscription," a poem written after the horrific battle of Fredericksburg:

To them who crossed the flood
      And climbed the hill, with eyes
           Upon the heavenly flag intent,
           And through the deathful tumult went
      Even unto death: to them this Stone--
      Erect, where they were overthrown--
           Of more than victory the monument.

This poem flows from the same impulse that led Melville to give Billy Budd the subtitle "an inside narrative." It endeavors to remind us of the ineffable "something more," the incommensurable lost lives that haunt our official histories.

Peter Campion is the author of a book of poems, Other People, and a monograph on the painter Mitchell Johnson.

© 2007 by Peter Campion. All rights reserved.



Poems 1955-2005, by Anne Stevenson. Dufour Editions. $64.95 cloth; $29.95 paper.

by D. H. Tracy

Anne Stevenson was born in England, raised and educated in the US, and has been living in various parts of Britain since the sixties. Poems 1955-2005 draws from thirteen publications since 1965, as well as from some early and late uncollected work. The poems are arranged thematically rather than chronologically, which was at first quite irritating (it is almost a reflexive response to want to compare early and late work) but grew on me. While I hesitate to imply Stevenson's writing has been static, she maintains a consistent sensibility and clustered interests that are able to make thematic categorizations work as more than curiosities. There aren't many poets who could profitably mix up work spanning fifty years, but she can.

Stevenson has written alertly on Sylvia Plath (she's Plath's age, but didn't start publishing until after Plath's death) and Elizabeth Bishop, and has obviously gone to school on them in her own work. More socially constituted than either of these poets, she possesses a charity that neither of them had, and suffers from an excess of consciousness that neither of them had either. I say "suffers" because the excess often manifests itself as literary mannerism or a chattiness of tone that does not entrain itself to the formal or dramatic requirements of the poem. Her challenge, generally speaking, is disciplining this excess. Her loose voice sounds like this:

For what traveller or exile, mesmerised by the sun
Or released by spaciousness from habitual self-denial,
Recalls without wistfulness its fine peculiarities
Or remembers with distaste its unique, vulnerable surfaces?
--From "England"

Compare this to:

A field of barley, feathered;
a fen full of sky-blue butterfly flax,
undulations like the ocean's
rolling right up to the cameraman's
pollen-dusted loafers.
And when Anthea sets up her easel

to catch in watercolour
a picturesque angle of the almshouses,
she scrupulously omits

electrical wiring and tv paraphernalia
that, in strange time, connect her to

"the brutish, uncivilized tempers of these parts" ...
--From "A Tourists' Guide to the Fens"

When in the latter mode, Stevenson's wry-but-not-bitter worldliness (it's striking how much she resembles Mona Van Duyn in this quality) is expansive enough for public elegy, light verse, social satire--there's something eighteenth-century about it. It just doesn't seem to lose its footing. Usually poets' most ambitious work is their worst, but Stevenson's jewel is the 1974 Correspondences, an extended portrait of a Yankee family based on a trove of letters Stevenson discovered at Radcliffe. She shows in these pieces a talent, not otherwise much on display, for mimicry--the voices throughout are distinctly and plausibly old, young, male, female, northern, southern, English, American, grave, flippant, and of their time. As technique, it is impressive; as an act of empathy, it is broad and sustained in a way that any one lyric cannot be. Her strongest short poems (I would nominate "Gannets Diving," "The Women," "Forgotten of the Foot," "Skills," "American Rhetoric for Scotland," "The White Room," "Elegy," "The Traveller," and "Willow Song") occur early, middle, and late. But whatever the case for the poems in it, the book compounds its successes in being a deep record of a robust and elastic sensibility, and in delivering us another not-so-minor Atlantic Goethe.

D.H. Tracy's poetry and criticism appear widely. He lives in Illinois.

© 2007 by D. H. Tracy. All rights reserved.



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