New and Collected Poems, 1970-1985
By David Ignatow
Wesleyan U. Press, $30 hardcover, $12.95 paper; 346 pages
Selected Poems
By Robert Bly
Harper & Row, $18.95 cloth, $8.95 paper; 211 pages
David Ignatow`s work has undergone some changes over the years, and there is in this new book less lyricism and more of his fablelike prose poems than in his earlier collection ”Poems, 1934-1969.” Yet the effect of Ignatow`s collected work is curiously powerful and single-minded, the product of an insistent pressure applied to the same fundamental questions considered from all possible angles.
Ignatow is truly a philosophical poet, and his poems, like Tolstoy`s novels, ask, How can human beings live? His arena is political, sexual, personal, spiritual, and his search is for the possibility of connections between things. The ”Invocation,” which opens his new book, begins:
Dirt and stone, if I may know you as you know yourselves,
if you do have sense of yourselves,
I walk upon and study you as my next brothers and sisters,
in this only way I know how to think about you.
This suggests the gentleness and darkness in Ignatow`s work, its colloquial ”flat” quality, as of a man musing to himself, his bravery in reaching out to all corners of thought, and his remarkably flexible line.
Ignatow`s work is original and distinctive as poetry can be only when it is grounded in conviction; above all else, his is a poetry of care and compassion.
If Ignatow is a master of the deliberate ”flat” style, Robert Bly is a genius of the elevated ”high” style, in the European tradition of Rilke and Yeats, the lush magical realism of the South Americans like Lorca and Neruda. Yet Bly`s work is truly American, taking its atmosphere of wide empty space from the Midwest, and its unabashed straightforward emotionalism and spiritualism.
The ”Selected Poems” show Bly`s astonishing range and depth and gives evidence of the remarkable contribution he has made to lyric poetry over the last 40 years.
Bly`s greatest gift is vision. He elicits fully the brightness of what is before him. As he remarks in one of his introductory notes, ”The one who writes seeing poems, then, is not the dreamer or the judge, but the giver of attention.” Bly has been both ”dreamer” and ”judge” but also a most loving and careful giver of attention, whether to a dying seal whose ”crown of his head looks like a boy`s leather jacket bending over some bicycle bars” or to water ”kneeling in the moonlight.”
This attentiveness makes a poet like Bly especially vulnerable to the subject of his art. The lyric poet provides a reflecting light–perhaps this is why moonlight is so often conjured in Bly`s work, as it was in the work of the Romantics–and the poem is exactly as serious as the subject it reflects upon.
At nearly the physical and surely the emotional center of Bly`s
”Selected Poems” is his most brilliant and powerful light, ”The Teeth Mother Naked at Last,” and his energy as a poet visibly builds toward and gradually recedes from those most masterful and devastating poems of political and spiritual anguish. Bly`s books since then have constituted a retreat from the fiery center, a regrouping of strength, experimentation and–perhaps–a readying for his next great leap, which will doubtless lie in some direction that no one–including Bly himself–could predict.
Bly has never hesitated to cross into sentimentality or even absurdity, and occasionally he is guilty of both (”There is a joyful night in which we lose / Everything, and drift / Like a radish”) but unevenness has been the blessing and curse of all lyric genius–the greater the genius, it seems, the more jagged the achievement, as proved by both Coleridge and Keats. Bly`s poetry has a purity and heroism worthy of our finest poets, and his greatest work may yet be before him.
