Take Heart
By Molly Peacock
Random House, 71 pages, $16.95
The Night Parade
By Edward Hirsch
Knopf, 84 pages, $18.95; $9.95 paper
Unfinished Painting
By Mary Jo Salter
Knopf, 68 pages, $18.95; $9.95 paper
The last 30 years of American poetry have been a long love affair with the committed sins of confession. The mass of poets now reaching mid-career may often be distinguished only by their technical variations on a common theme, though technique is rare when poets prefer force of personality. The three poets under review have the virtue of having character, and of responding divergently to the impulse to provide a formal psychology of the middle class.
Molly Peacock`s poetry is fraught with anxiety, frazzled with artifice.
”Take Heart,” her third book, continues the wounded reflections that marked her last, where she discovered the perverse technique she has raised to formal consideration, the use of rhyme without meter.
She turns to her themes like an injured animal: to abortion, the loneliness of sexual relation and the emotional deadness of childhood with an alcoholic father (”What happened earlier I`m not sure of./Of course he was drunk, but often he was./His face looked like a ham on a hook. . . .”).
”Angry,/ dense and mulish” in her own estimation, Peacock seeks out the unlovely ways of her character. Rhyme is her idiosyncrasy, a private restraint that permits a public order. Though she employs rhyme only when convenient, and rarely precisely, she finds it a stimulus to imaginative display, and in its small adherences a permission for the release of repressed feeling: in this, rhyme is a Rorschach.
She is not immune to the brutality, the desire to shock or sicken, that confession easily succumbs to; but such shock gives her writing an electric vividness and control it otherwise lacks:
A curette has the shape of a grapefruit spoon./They dilate the cervix, then clean out the womb/with the jagged prow, just like separating/the grapefruit from its skin, although the softening/yellow rind won`t bear another fruit. . . .
Peacock`s strength is the stateliness of her self-hatred; she loathes her wish to be the perfect patient. Her poetry is most honest not in its submersion in carnality but in the minor betrayals of character. When she buys a fake fur she cannot afford, she is alive to all the implications of being false and buying false.
Peacock`s narratives are nervier than her meditations: she does not have the verbal gifts to make striking or memorable observations, and her notions near the fatuous (”What we don`t forget is what we don`t say,” ”The ocean`s great to look at/because there`s enough of it”). Even so, she is sometimes able to capture the complications and clumsiness, the fine moral messiness, of a life anxious to its edges.
Edward Hirsch`s poems argue for a sentimental transcendence where ”We will be lifted up and carried a far distance/On invisible wings.” ”The Night Parade” undertakes the suffering exploration of memory begun in his earlier work, but with greater concentration and conviction.
Though a few of his poems, including a savage evocation of the Black Death, live in the realm of history, he always returns to the emotional substrate of family, to his grandparents` emigration from eastern Europe and his own childhood in a lavishly memorialized Chicago.
Like most poets of sentiment, Hirsch is drawn to the ripeness of death, and his elegies are complicated by the prurience of unconscious seduction, their images ambiguously lush (”cancer feasted on their ripe bodies/From the inside”).
He writes limpidly, if at times limply, but because he has little interest in the formal arrangement of language or even the various subsidizing strategies of free verse, his poems rely on prose for rhythm and ancedote for structure (much of the book might fall under the title of one long poem,
”Family Stories”).
The tales of his grandmother`s Murphy bed, or his sister`s Little League triumph, or his moment of rapture on Parents Day in 1963 are well rehearsed but might have been left in the snapshot album. Only occasionally do the images demand deeper response, as during an abortion in a ”dingy hotel room in downtown Detroit,” when the doctor`s ”girlfriend fiddled with the radio/ And lounged against the door in her spiked heels.” That image of bland disregard required artistry rather than fidelity to memory.
Though as a younger poet he has been richly and repeatedly honored, Hirsch relies too much on a solicitude that can seem oleaginous, and on those recurring images of transcendence (”Though in a moment I was lifted up/and transported”), which invoke the sentimental grotesque.
He is capable of language less avidly self-rewarding:
There are two purple welts on the horizon/And a thimble of yellow dye/
spilled in the ironwoods/And the fleshy chrysanthemums/growing out of the hips/Of the Japanese cemetery by the ocean. . . .
If he were more frequently unfaithful to his furies, the Chekhovian pathos his poems aspire to, since not so eagerly sought, might be more easily granted.
Mary Jo Salter resurrects a world of interiors whose moral and meaning are measured by windows, mirrors and the self-informing life of paintings and objects d`art. She has not received as much attention as some of her peers, though her second book, ”Unfinished Painting,” is the current Lamont Poetry Selection.
Its 20 or so poems, including long elegies for her mother and a Japanese friend, betray a relatively chilly formal manner, hedged by a rare technical regard. Even in the most intimate situations she is guarded and detached, observing but never implicated, never breaching the artistic distance.
Such concern for decorum courts the claustrophobia that stalks these poems. If nature is invoked, it is the nature painted on a Chinese fan:
”cowlicked shoots of rice/rising up from honey-/combed terraces.” That severe inspection of the artist`s delicate stroke requires Coleridge`s armed vision, and when turned on the living it creates images of frigid beauty, as in the spectacle of a Japanese bride:
to see that snow/mountain of kimono/and, falling from the pinnacle/of her lacquered wig, the fog of silk/over a face too shy, too proud/to lift. Who`d made her up?-the natural/milk of her skin absorbed in chalk,/a slope of powder/down to her collar. . . .
Even life can be made into art, into the apparition of Mt. Fuji rising from snow, fog and powdered slope. ”Who`d made her up?” is a question with a double bind, and behind its admission of fictional contrivance lies the complicity and coiling her sentences surrender to.
A poet so primly attentive to art is, unsurprisingly, attracted deeply and disturbingly to Emily Dickinson, who also found a philosophy in hermitage. Salter has none of her mentor`s ease in forming the simple language of feeling and is too eager to draw a lesson or round a revelation from already constricted means.
She might seem too tight-lipped to take advantage of the liberating virtues her poems command as technical achievements; but the personal, unaffected voice she discovers in ”Armistice Day” and ”Dead Letters,”
poems tinged with death and the ironies of death, finally overcomes her domestic mordancy and promises a manner equal to her technical mastery. Her unassuming composure cannot mask the ambition of her grace and intelligence, or her demand on the chain of artistic influence and imitation we call tradition.
