Poetry Chronicle WHAT GOES ON
Selected and New Poems, 1995-2009.
By Stephen Dunn.
Norton, $24.95.The speaker of Dunn’s recent poems is a regular guy cursed with an understanding of human nature more subtle than he’d prefer. A poem like “The Unsaid” succeeds not only because it nails its depiction of a couple stalled by miscommunication and reproach — “In the bedroom they undressed and dressed / and got into bed. The silence was what fills / a tunnel after a locomotive passes through” — but because the poem’s very existence squares its pathos: the speaker understands the problem perfectly but still can’t solve it. A typical Dunn poem opens up a basic human trouble — a body souring with age, a marriage souring with regret, a believer souring with doubt — meditates on it with equal parts seriousness and good humor, and finally offers not quite consolation but acceptance, a sense of having gained some measure of dignity simply by looking life in the eye. As is true of every other poet who ever lived, what’s best about Dunn is also what’s worst: in his case, a plainspoken, curlicue-free lucidity (I actually want to say “wisdom,” but fear it makes Dunn sound square or folksy, faults he’s too sharp and wry to be accused of), which is a tonic in small doses but can cause numbness if consumed in quantity. “Please Understand” ends “I’ve never been able to tell / what’s worth more — what I want or what I have.” “What Men Want” ends “After the power to choose / a man wants the power to erase.” “Nature” ends, “Gray, then, was the only truth in the world.” I trust the poet’s every nuanced ambivalence but eventually find myself wishing — against my better instincts, and his — that he’d burn a house down or get baptized or anything else definitive and audacious.
MERCURY DRESSING
Poems.
By J. D. McClatchy.
Knopf, $25.Has your companion ever reported some wonderful thing you said in your sleep, like “snowflake operator” or “funky nectarine”? I regret to inform you that no matter how clever you may have thought your unconscious self, McClatchy probably has you beat: the first line of his “Poem Beginning With a Line Spoken, I Am Told, in My Sleep” — “The names of every place were once so cold” — is in iambic pentameter. Given McClatchy’s formal virtuosity, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn he jots his grocery lists in terza rima, too. Such exquisiteness sometimes seems merely an end in itself, as in “Indonesia,” which cleverly compares, for 30 lines and no good reason, an epidermal rash to an archipelago. “The Seven Deadly Sins” possesses a relentless elegance of expression, but many of its ideas are banal (“Dogged voluptuaries usually make straight / For the very thing they over and over have had, / Then vomit up the greedily swallowed bait”), grandiloquent (“When Francis of Assisi ate, / Ashes were his only spice. / The condiments in plump Cockaigne / Disguise the taste to help explain / Why temperance is a sacrifice / The belly’s meant to palliate”) or nonsensical (“From alley to boardroom, in coffee cup or coffer, / Not to accumulate but to count, to compare, / Brings down both the beggar and the millionaire”). McClatchy is most engaging when he’s got a story to tell instead of an idea to fuss with. “Trees, Walking” is a powerful and wonderfully strange account of the speaker’s relationship with his father (among many other things), and “Sorrow in 1944,” a sonnet sequence imagining how life might have turned out for the son of Madama Butterfly, represents the collection’s most focused and indispensable moment.
ONE SECRET THING
By Sharon Olds.
Knopf, $26.95.Admirers of Olds’s poems will find more of them in this, her ninth collection. Olds selects intense moments from her family romance — usually ones involving violence or sexuality or both — and then stretches them in opposite directions, rendering them in such obsessive detail that they seem utterly unique to her personal experience, while at the same time using metaphor to insist on their universality. The speaker of “Home Theater, 1955” spends the poem’s first nine lines — a full quarter of its total length — describing the skimpy animal-themed bedclothes she wore as a child, then tells the story of a night her father became so violent her sister had to call for police officers, one of whom the speaker remembers glancing at her bare legs. In its final lines, the poem switches in a blink from autobiography to myth: “Soon after our father had struck himself down, / there had risen up these bachelors / beside the sink and stove, and the tiny / mastodons, and bison, and elk, the / beasts on my front and back, began, / atonal, as if around an early fire, to chant.” It’s a nifty move, but a pretty familiar one — Olds has been making it for almost 30 years — and in this book it’s too often too easy to see the epiphanies coming. When in the first lines of “Animal Dress” the poet’s daughter puts on her mother’s black sweater “with maroon creatures / knitted in,” you can tell you’re in for another Joseph Campbell moment in the poem’s final lines, and sure enough.
SESTETS
By Charles Wright.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.Wright’s poems don’t bear down toward conclusions, they expand and evanesce as if in a valiant, impossible effort to comprehend and demonstrate Wittgenstein’s dictum that “the world is all that is the case.” Wright’s new collection of short poems is less a book unto itself than the next installment in a continuous poem he’s been writing for 40-odd years. “Description is expiation, / and not a place to hunker down in,” he writes. “It is a coming to terms with. / Or coming to terms without. / As though whatever we had to say could keep it real. / As though our words were flies, / and the dead meat kept reappearing.” These accounts of language as simultaneously a fond illusion and our only hope for a stable place to stake a claim on reality pose the problem Wright wisely resists pretending poetry can solve. Instead, he revels and finds a freedom in it: “Water remains immortal — / Poems can’t defile it, / the heron, immobile on one leg, / Stands in it, snipe stitch it, and heaven pillows its breast.” Trouble can arise when Wright’s open-endedness leads him to believe that any idea, no matter how ungainly or hackneyed, deserves a place in the poem, as in “Music for Midsummer’s Eve”: “Time is an untuned harmonium / That Muzaks our nights and days. / Sometimes it lasts for a little while, / sometimes it goes on forever.” I can swallow “Muzaks” with some effort, but those last two lines wouldn’t pass muster at Hallmark. Fortunately, few such clunkers disrupt Wright’s complex and contrary harmonies.
Joel Brouwer’s books of poems are “Exactly What Happened,” “Centuries” and, most recently, “And So.” He teaches at the University of Alabama.
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