WEST WIND
By Mary Oliver
Mariner/Houghton Mifflin, $13 paper
A stunning outpouring of song; a series of incredibly disciplined and achieved artifacts: Mary Oliver’s best poems–and this volume is studded with terrific poems– show that in the lyric poem, ecstasy reveals itself best in wild measures. Her wildness seems unmeasured even as it submits to form: On this seeming paradox, perhaps it is not inappropriate to invoke a poet who, in style if not in romantic commitment, seems far from Oliver–Allen Ginsberg–who asserted, “mind is shapely.” Oliver’s mind wants either to discover or to bestow shape: Her poems continue the romantic inquiry into the possible congruences of mind and nature. As she addresses herself in “West Wind”: “you there, rewriting nature/so anyone can understand it–/what will you say about the roses–/their sighing, their tossing.” And her language–so rich, so sensuous (“honeyed seizures,” “the fog’s blue bell”), the words bursting the hinges of the line, her syntax pressing against each line’s end; it is no surprise that one of the recurring words and images of this book is “loop”–as in the loop of a snake’s body, soon revealed to be its castoff skin; as in the looping of the mind back on itself.
Alluding in her title to Shelley’s famous “Ode to the West Wind,” meditating explicitly on that poet in several poems, Oliver might be accused of an untransformed and reactionary romanticism. One would think that poems about self, nature, death and ecstasy had run their course in English. Think again.
GREEN SEES THINGS IN WAVES
By August Kleinzahler
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $22
Ludic, urbane, wildly inventive, August Kleinzahler’s poems offer that rare and wonderful thing: surprise. You almost never know where a poem will go, but as a reader you follow expectant and excited by the dizzying turns of Kleinzahler’s mind and lines. These poems are wonderful fabrications in all senses of the term “wonderful.”
The opening title poem introduces us to Green, a melancholic soul who, when he wakes “first thing each day sees waves.” This hallucinatory premise opens out onto a dazzling discourse that encompasses particle physics and sound waves but returns always to Green’s doleful registration of the sensible world–the sounds “from the street and plumbing next door.”
It is difficult to sum up Kleinzahler’s book, precisely because he is so virtuosic. In some poems, he explores the workings of disordered, even deranged minds. In a poem with the self-consciously archaic title “They Ofttimes Choose,” he adopts an 18th Century manner and diction. In still others he writes gorgeously and hauntingly of remembered landscapes and common objects, as in the exquisitely chiseled poem, “Tanka-Toys: A Memoir.”
The texture of his poetry is similarly various and remarkable. A masterful manipulator of syntax, he also ranges easily and startlingly across dictions. Raiding high and low culture, he switches easily from the colloquial (“lordjesussaveus they’re still making babies,” in “Snow in North Jersey”) to the recondite (in the bravura meditation on the reading of the human pulse, in “What the Science of the Ancients Told”). But for all the cerebral flights of this book, many poems descend into wonderfully sensuous, strange comedy. Witness “The Dog Stoltz,” a fantastic tale about a foppish, bookish dog who has mysteriously latched onto the fussy speaker: “Dogs cannot write. My mother told me this./As for his talk, well, I took no special notice./His love of the war poets was well known.”
AUTUMN SONATA: Selected Poems of Georg Trakl
Translated by Daniel Simko, introduction by Carolyn Forche
Moyer Bell/Asphodel Press, $13.95 paper
In this reissue of Daniel Simko’s 1989 award-winning translation, Georg Trakl’s brooding poems come to us with a new introduction by poet Carolyn Forche, who describes Trakl as “arguably the first poet of German Expressionism.” Trakl emerges in Forche’s essay as a figure almost absurdly emblematic of his time, place and vocation: Born in Salzburg in 1887, dead of a self-administered cocaine overdose in 1914, this drug-addicted and increasingly tormented young man served as a lieutenant pharmacist during World War I. He left behind an exquisite body of work, and this volume, with his poems on the left facing Simko’s English versions on the right, provides a strong dose of Trakl’s compelling and often morbid vision.
However tempting it is to read his work in light of his biography, there is no need: These poems, like Rilke’s a late flowering of a 19th Century German lyrical lexicon, are stunning parables, many of them reading as if they were fairy tales gone awry. Dusk, forests, taverns, wanderers, deer, nocturnal birds and orphan girls recur in the interior landscapes that these poems trace as if they were perfectly visible.
Americans may find the experience of reading Trakl something like reading Robert Frost crossed with Edgar Allen Poe. Like Frost’s deceptively simple, formally beguiling poems, Trakl’s lyric narratives often veer in their last stanzas and lines into something more ominous: The brief poem “My Heart at Evening” concludes, in Simko’s version, “Through black branches comes the ringing of grieving bells;/Dew covers your face.” In this way, a trip through the “darkening forest” becomes this astonishing thing, a seeming prophecy of the reader’s own future as a corpse. If Simko’s translations do not always honor Trakl’s subtle syntactic shifts and repetitions, nevertheless they effectively reveal the rich fund of images and motifs that Trakl drew upon and transformed.
MYSTERIES OF SMALL HOUSES
By Alice Notley
Penguin, $14.95 paper
It is hard to believe that Alice Notley graduated years ago from the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop, because her careening, exploratory poetry has nothing of the air of the “workshop poem” about it. Author of more than 20 books, Notley has a well-deserved reputation as a renegade experimentalist. Associated with the second generation of the so-called New York School of poetry (whose first generation included John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara), Notley offers in this volume a moving, funny, absorbing autobiography of a sensibility as well as a lived life.
On first reading, these poems seem stream-of-consciousness ruminations; on second reading, one recognizes the stringently self-inquiring mind at work amidst the flow. Such titles as “House of Self,” “I’m Just Rigid Enough” and “47th Birthday” point to the autobiographical premises of many poems. But Notley has a distinctive capacity for warping our sense of the “I”: like Keats, she seems to regard herself as an allegorical creature, as both an intensely specific being and a generalizable sentience. As the title of one poem asserts, “The Person That You Were Will Be Replaced.” This oscillation between the concrete, sexed, historical, merely biographical self and the larger horizons of existence contributes to the fantastic pull of these poems.
One sees Notley’s mind at work, turning and returning, playing and replaying. In this book one encounters a sustained and rigorous idealism. As a sample of her sifting arrivals and several commitments, here is the conclusion of her poem “Experience”:
So glad I don’t have to write
in the styles of the poetries I was taught
they were beautiful and unlike me
positing a formal, stylized woman.
But I am the poet, without doubt.
Experience is a hoax.
