Above the River:
The Complete Poems
By James Wright
Wesleyan University Press
and Farrar, Straus Giroux, 387 pages, $27.95
The Want Bone
By Robert Pinsky
Ecco Press, 70 pages, $17.95
In the Western Night:
Collected Poems, 1965-90
By Frank Bidart
Farrar, Straus Giroux, 244 pages, $19.95
James Wright`s ”Above The River: The Complete Poems” both confirms and qualifies the standard account of his career-a career that ended sadly with his death in 1980 at age 53. The story goes that with the publication of his justly famous book ”The Branch Will Not Break” (1963), Wright escaped the shackles of academic formalism and began to conjure in open measures the dreamy textures of the inward life and the mysterious energies of nature.
Of course Wright never entirely abandoned writing in meter. In all his volumes there are poems in traditional measures. And while his best poems were written in free verse, this new edition demonstrates that there`s much more continuity of theme and attitude between the formal and informal work than the conventional accounts of Wright`s career indicate.
Early and late, he was a romantic poet. Consciousness for him, as for Keats, meant consciousness of change, loss and separation of the self from the natural wholeness of instinctive being. This is why in his early work Wright so often identifies himself with drunks, whores, murderers and traitors, all those who by virtue of their exclusion from the comforts of social life dramatize the inherent isolation of conscious creatures in an unconscious universe.
The same sense of loneliness pervades the later work except that now the open forms, the simple diction and the eerily disjunctive metaphors and images attempt to bridge the chasm that the formal work defines and mourns: ”There is this cave/ In the air behind my body/ That nobody is going to touch:/ A cloister, a silence/ Closing around a blossom of fire./ When I stand upright in the wind,/ My bones turn to dark emeralds.”
If Wright`s disaffection with social reality leads him much of the time into a sentimental celebration of nature and unconscious life, in poems such as ”A Blessing” and ”Lying In A Hammock at William Duffy`s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,” from ”The Branch Will Not Break, and in several other lyrics from his last two wonderful books, ”To a Blossoming Pear Tree” (1977) and ”This Journey” (1982), he celebrates the natural order without abandoning the human. At his best he writes with preternatural lucidity about those moments when the self and world appear to merge.
”The Want Bone,” Robert Pinsky`s fourth collection, is less essayistic though more intellectually demanding than his first two books, ”Sadness and Happiness” (1975) and ”An Explanation of America” (1979) and less autobiographical though in some ways more personal than his third book,
”History of My Heart” (1984). Yet it shares with all of Pinsky`s previous work an improvisational impulse and jazzy speed, moving with unpredictable precision among the sacred and profane legacies that compose the self.
The two central concerns of ”The Want Bone” are, first, that the imagination is continually reinventing the self by revising the stories and traditions it inherits and, second, that the imagination itself is a profoundly ambiguous power, ”plural, playful” as Pinksy puts it in ”Shiva and Parvati,” ”. . . entering, endowing/ And also devouring.”
In ”The Refinery,” Pinsky suggests that the imagination is a kind of energy refined like oil from dead life, old inventions, forgotten stories and that, like the energy oil generates, it can be used in destructive and creative ways. If poems can be made from it, so too can bombs, or religious orthodoxies that oppress and inhibit.
Pinsky conceives of the self as ”a bright confusion” of social and linguistic histories (”The Window”), a fluid mix of exterior influence and interior, largely unconsicous need, ”embodied maybe in codes,/ Spurts of pressure and crucial variations in the current of the soul, that lives by changing” (”What Why When How Who”). Yet if he calls into serious question the American belief in the self as radically unencumbered and autonomous, he resists the implications of his questioning. What counteracts the fear implicit in Pinsky`s vision of the self as a blur of mongrel forces is the imaginative freedom that the speaker himself exemplifies, bringing to light and linking the disparate social, literary and religious traditions woven into the fabric of even the most mundane experience.
Though he does not treat his own experience directly, Pinsky`s identity as one of America`s most inventive poets is even more apparent in these pages than in any of his previous books. Like the catbird in the book`s lovely concluding poem, ”Pleasure Bay,” he sings ”with borrowed music that he melds and changes.”
Though none of the characters that appears in Frank Bidart`s ”In The Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90” is simple, there is a kind of raw, primal, Old Testament simplicity in the way they present themselves and think about their lives, transforming personal anguish into feverish emblems of being human. Bidart`s characters are incarnations of Job, caught at moments of crisis, demanding answers to unanswerable questions.
In ”Ellen West” an anexoric girl suffers the mysteries of her divided nature-unable to reconcile the competing claims of an idealizing spirit and an ordinary, imperfect, needful body. Her illness projects in radical form what T.S. Eliot called ”the dissociation of sensibility”: that each of us experiences the body as something other than ourselves (that is, we say we
”have” a body), and yet we are the body that we have.
In ”The Arc,” a man whose arm has been amputated attempts to reconcile himself to his loss by erasing memory, pretending ”I had never had more/ than one arm, that the image/ faced in the mirror/ was the only, the inevitable image. . .”, only to discover that without memory everything ”became cardboard.”
The extraordinary power of Bidart`s poetry derives from his passionate commitment to moral and psychological investigation together with his tragic recognition that whatever insight we achieve is circumscribed by ignorance and mystery and cannot save us. This sense of insight as both necessary and inadequate results in a discursive, skeptical syntax that dramatizes the turns and counterturns of a mind seeking answers while distrusting all the answers that it finds.
”The First Hour of the Night,” the concluding poem, is Bidart`s most ambitious treatment of the desire for some final knowledge ”of the cause of things” in tension with life`s irreducibly mysteriousness. If the poem lacks the dramatic specificity of his early work, in its anguishing appraisal of the tradition of western metaphysical thought in relation to the problems of self- knowledge on the one hand and those of power and religious persecution on the other, it achieves a grandeur of vision few poets nowadays can match.
