Talent and More
Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. By John Berry- man. (Faber, 18s.) Poems. By Rex Taylor. (Hutchinson, 15s)
EVERY one of these books deserves more attention than it will get here, yet some of them look pretty small beside Mr. Berryman's. Verse is a harsh discipline, and one kind of pains, most severe pains at that, will take a poet only to a sane Gibraltar of competence and achievement, where- as the madmen, crazy and well-found at the same time, welter strenuously in the ocean beyond these pillars. Mr. Berryman includes in his book early poems (before 1940) which are well-found and even distinguished, and some later ones of a much higher power ('Boston Common'); while the `Nervous Songs' bear the marks of the de- mentia which turns a good minor poet into a major poet, good or bad. The long 'Homage to Mistress Bradstreet' is a major poem beyond all question. English readers may need more help with it than the author's notes provide; and they may think too much about Hopkins, when the main technical device is (1 guess) a controlled pastiche of the American Colonial manner of Edward Taylor and Mrs. Bradstreet herself.
vanity & the follies of youth took hold of me; then the pox blasted, when the Lord returned. That year for my sorry face so-much-older Simon burned, so Father smiled, with love. Their will be done. He to me lingeringly, learning to shun a bliss, a lightning blood vouchsafed, what did seem life. 1 kissed his Mystery.
The distorted syntax is of course not merely archaistic; nor is the use of the sixteenth-century `Mirror' device (poet visited by autobiographical ghost). New England Calvinism and the strange life of Anne Bradstreet are used to place life in a narrow but numinous context; the violence of the poem is proper to its sense of life, and nothing here is archaic but the sense of lived terror.
Robert Lowell is a poet thought of as belonging to a similar tradition; he had no need to break out of his talent, and his superb powers were obvious, not only in The Quaker Graveyard' but also in different kinds of poetry, like The Ghost' and 'Falling Asleep over the Aeneid.' But it seems to be slack tide with Mr. Lowell; the sequence 'Life Studies,' which is the greater part of this book, strikes one as the work of a poet so sure of his power that he does not recognise the danger of lapsing into superior doggerel when he too luxuriously controls it. I do not mean that these poems on his ancestors and himself are ever less than acute and fresh in detail, but only that he is, as it were, asking us to provide tenseness and strength from memories of his earlier work when we read, for instance, Smiling on all, Father was once successful enough to be lost in the mob of ruling-class Bostonians, etc.
Mr. Logue refuses to be trapped in a talent. He is of course not a wit-writer (he hates them) but a wisdom-writer, and sometimes goes to sea in a sieve. He is somewhat too persistently epatant, not only in his dirty words but in his pamphleteering typography, and his habit of achieving spontaneity too spontaneously. I like him best not when he is exceedingly gnomic or 'engaged,' but when he writes with music in mind; his title suggests that this is his main business, and he does it very well, with much art. The twenty love poems adapted from Neruda have been accused of an inaccuracy and licence that debilitate the original, but they seem to me very effective, especially the last of them; and far more so to the ear than the eye. The poem about the Gardener, which is also for music, is also more than charming. Mr. Logue is an excellent poet to have with us at this time. So, I think, is Miss Beer, though for different reasons; she is occasionally a very obscure writer, but the obscurity is of the kind that strengthens one's confidence. She can also be transparently clear, and her use of language is perpetually new with- out straining after novelty. The sequence called The Loss of the Magyar' is a noble achievement.
This brings us to the talent-trapped. Mr. Michie gave me much pleasure with his Larkinish sen- tences spread neatly out over quiet, difficult stanza forms, and a sharply individual fantasy ('Arizona Nature Myth,"Quiet, Child,' Dooley is a Traitor'). Poems should not nowadays begin 'Muzzy with drink, I . . .,' but all round Mr. Michie is far too pleasant to be resisted. Mr. Har- rison aims higher and more often falls short, as in a bad poem about Florence; but he brings off his best trick, the patient, accurate exploration of a single image, with admirable power—Snow' and 'Water' one could not quote except completely. Among the ambitious poems his 'Five Negative Sonnets' seem most promising. Two more impres- sive first collections.
Miss Wayne, also making a first appearance, earns respect by trying, in 'The Shadows,' to articu- late a poem of some 400 lines. She has obvio gifts but not quite the control or balance for considerable an attempt. Of her other poems, som have that feminine quality Mr. Amis once r corded with ungenerous precision in 'Somethi Nasty in the Bookshop'; and there are echoes other women poets. But some have what we corn placently call a masculine toughness (`Passi Comments'). Mr. Taylor, despite the ambition his Michael Collins 'poem for voices,' is the mos restricted of these poets, though very assured; th pleasure you get from his rural epigrams wil depend upon whether you have kept unblunte your taste for this version of pastoral. Finally, there is Mrs. Lessing's little book, as uneasy as i is various in manner, but the opusculum of s considerable writer cannot be without interest.
FRANK KERM
Previous page
