Category Archives: Fresh Looks

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FRESH LOOKS: Laura (Riding) Jackson’s “The Wind Suffers”

7 June 2013

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THE WIND SUFFERS

The wind suffers of blowing,
The sea suffers of water,
And fire suffers of burning,
And I of a living nature.

As stone suffers of stoniness,
As light of its shiningness,
As birds of their wingedness,
So I of my whoness.

And what the cure of all this?
What the not and not suffering?
What the better and later of this?
What the more me of me?

How for the pain-world to be
More world and no pain?
How for the old rain to fall
More wet and more dry?

How for the wilful blood to run
More salt-red and sweet-white?
And how for me in my actualness
To more shriek and more smile?

By no other miracles,
By the same knowing poison,
By an improved anguish,
By my further dying.

The general deadening risk of anaphoric structure in “The Wind Suffers” is interrogated by Jackson’s abandonment of connectives and conjunctions (‘And what the cure of all this?’ ‘How for the old rain to fall,’ ‘What the more me of me?’), her refusal to yield to the gerund (or, if you like, her refusal to be ‘presently progressive’), and, most importantly, a palpable sincerity, an existential thrownness that speaks to both meaning and grammar.

‘The wind suffers of blowing’—how immediately early Renaissance paintings spring to mind, featuring Aeolus or Zephyr with pink and puffy cheeks; on the heels of that, I chide myself for anthropomorphism relating to this natural thing, the wind; as a lasting coda, I wonder how wind can ‘blow’ without a force to expel or propel it (trees can be ‘blown’ by wind, obviously), and what it must mean for the wind to be ‘made,’ and in being made, suffer. This quandary grows knives following:

The sea suffers of water,
And fire suffers of burning,
And I of a living nature.

Notice how cleverly Jackson mixes gerunds (and thus paces) here: ‘The sea suffers of water’—that is, of the thing which composes it, which defines its ‘seaness,’ without which it would cease to be a sea—the fire of ‘burning,’ without which it cannot be ‘progressively present’; and ‘I,’ the speaker, ‘of a living nature,’ a nature—a manner of being—that is defined by getting on. In all quarters, it is the pressure to be extant that causes suffering, and the action of life is shown as rooted in plain ‘living,’ subsistence, implying that even stasis is restive with the demand to ‘live on.’ This collapse of subsistence and action is further illuminated, in the next stanza, by the trials of ‘stone,’ ‘light,’ the bird for her ‘wingedness’ and the speaker, again, for her ‘whoness’—the next thing that her ‘living nature’ demands is a definition, apparently, an object to which her signifier points. 

The speaker begins to experience psychic vertigo, listing barely intelligible oppositions (‘What the better and later of this?’ or ‘How for the old rain to fall/More wet and more dry?’) and resolutions (the ‘pain-world’ is solved by becoming ‘more world and no pain’) as the experiential ‘outside’ pressures her senses: one can almost see the speaker sitting in a tight corner, head-in-hands. It is only through something like defiance, a refusal to either placate or be placated

And how for me in my actualness
To more shriek and more smile?

that the formerly boundless suffering (that is, suffering that began at conscious ‘being’) is confronted: it is by ‘the same knowing poison’ (by the poison that already ‘knows’? by the poison known as Knowing?) and an ‘improved anguish’ that the speaker approaches cessation, the end of being. ‘Improved anguish’ . . . is this, via Jean-Paul Sartre, embracing the verges of death while one lives? an anguish that lives to unapologetically reveal what binds anguish to being?

Which, in the second case, may be ‘everything.’

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Stephanie Rose Adams’ “The Honey Jar”

28 May 2013

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Salient in Ezra Pound’s too-profuse stream of Modernist poetic dictates is his admonishment that poetry be ‘as well written as prose.’ What’s most amazing about the surety of his directive is its absolute vagary: Moby-Dick is not ‘well written’ in the way that Austen is, nor Melmoth the Wanderer, nor Walden, nor even “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” This may account for the dissipation of Pound’s Imagist group in general; more likely, however, such attempts to make of poetry a calculus fail because, as Dickinson intimates, the ‘Possibility’ of poetry is ‘a fairer house than Prose’—the kind of prose that imagines itself erected on reason alone, at least (which, of course, Moby-Dick or To the Lighthouse or Wuthering Heights never did).

Stephanie Rose Adams’ “The Honey Jar” strikes me as a poem whose power accumulates via ‘possibility,’ ambience, charges. Lain down ‘dripping’ in darkness for a century, this ‘strange one’—who acts as a kind of ghost protagonist in “The Honey Jar,” commanding the pace of the poem from a deeply inhabited silence, one with the force of a relic—is importantly devoid of a readable ‘history’ outside his dying. He projects from ‘death’s hard yellow womb,’ ‘mellified . . . folded and macerated’—Adams’ refusal to locate the subject as king or peasant or regular unfortunate transforms a would-be colonialist exhumation narrative into Death’s—or is it Sublimnity’s?—paean.

Adams handles the resulting ‘reveal’ (‘the underground-of-man, the sea’) like an adept psychologist: the ‘cold’ fear of the tradesmen becomes ‘feign[ed] cool waiting and looking about’—one can’t help but recognize the method of blasé repose that keeps us, ourselves, distant and safe from the sincerity that wonder demands. The echo of Dickinson’s [372]

First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—

is likewise impossible to ignore, whatever its origin. 

Of the many things the resultant ‘lingering stink of the living’ might imply—that the once-life and resonance of this mummified man might stay with the tradesmen, that their own continuance as men living in the world is suddenly more electric to their senses—I like to sit with one result of “The Honey Jar” best: that, given the chance to investigate the historical antecedent of the poem (if there was one), the poem itself, its own ‘distant color/come too near’ was absolutely adequate; that Adams’ metaphysik, stanza by stanza, convinced me its particular method of ‘telling’ is knowledge enough.

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FRESH LOOKS: Louise Glück’s “Telescope”

22 May 2012

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TELESCOPE

There is a moment after you move your eye away
when you forget where you are
because you’ve been living, it seems,
somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.

You’ve stopped being here in the world.
You’re in a different place,
a place where human life has no meaning.

You’re not a creature in a body.
You exist as the stars exist,
participating in their stillness, their immensity.

Then you’re in the world again.
At night, on a cold hill,
taking the telescope apart.

You realize afterward
not that the image is false
but the relation is false.

You see again how far away
each thing is from every other thing.

Per the general quality of this piece, you might find it quizzical that I first chanced upon it in the New Yorker—gravesite as that place has become for poetry. I remember the afternoon clearly: still quite the debutant, probably off a day walking up and down Newbury Street in Boston, browsing glossies at the Trident, I thought This IS the kind of work it takes to get into a good poetry periodical.

It was years later that, still resonant, the final two lines of the poem made it into one of my itinerant Google searches, and the poem was rediscovered. Though Glück’s particular troubles with hack or half-examined philosophy continue to trouble her here (the very purport of the poem, for example, hinges on the supposed merit of the verso of the idea that space is a place ‘where human life has no meaning’—why ought human life have no meaning in space if space has some meaning to the human? and how can one so easily assume that stars do not have a ‘body’ of sorts?), her very straightforward construction and pacing creates a precipitous drop at “Telescope’s” close.

It’s the turn after the third stanza—its abruptness—that solidified the last couplet’s simmering power. How well Glück’s leanness serves her, in this case:

Then you’re in the world again.
At night, on a cold hill,
taking the telescope apart.

The denouement is utterly ruthless; even if the speaker’s philosophy was hack previous, still the act of thinking did a good deal for transportation of the mind; as soon as the eye is plucked from the telescope, twelve of the following thirteen sounds are monosyllables, and explanation is of the most bony (though bright) sort.

And if this poem speaks to certain of Glück’s writerly quandaries, it also finds success in a rare spot: namely, the speaker’s refusal to marry revelation (or sadness) to the corporeal.   She is less a sufferer than a witness to suffering, and the coil of the poem does not release, but marvelously disintegrates.

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FRESH LOOKS: Timothy Donnelly’s “Monastic”

24 February 2012

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MONASTIC

The ruined cathedral wept into my flesh
because I held nothing within me with warmth
enough to deflect it. I flattened a hand

against its relief to imagine the hand
that had carried it out—the cuff, the garment, the quick
scent of limestone struck into shape

and the whimper of cooling.
I carried myself with all I imagined
down to a lake, letting

are you          are you
loose over water, out in the air—
how incomprehensible

being has been to me
from the beginning—and back
to the rock, laying all of it

down—slant wood overhead
that would moulder away,
the cowl, the calling, I can hear

the voice carried back to me,
lessoned, my own
blown voice, blowing          there          there.

“Monastic” possesses what I am more and more interested in calling ‘gnosis’ in poetry—reach-towards-γνωστικοί, but with more mysticism than the Platonic use would imply. We note a rarefied reflective power in the opening stanzas, and one that seems likewise interested in psychical relations to the physical, or how imagined physicality translates into a kind of psychic shock: ‘the ruined cathedral [weeps]‘ into the speaker’s flesh, the blocks of which ‘whimper’ in cooling. While the latter transfer is far more potent (perhaps because it is immediately sensible, while ‘wept into my flesh’ has the whiff of pathos), both set stage for the draw-and-repulse conflict the speaker experiences in his encounter.

It’s not happenstance that the poem begins to deepen considerably after the vulnerability at ‘whimper’ has been realized. ‘I carried myself with all I imagined/down to a lake’ is not so foreign to the scene that that it vaults us into a disconnected dreamspace, but it does indicate a revelatory field: Donnelly does the job of an expert collagist, blurring the boundary between monastic builders themselves and the speaker’s method of ‘carrying.’ How satisfying the vision of this speaker is, then, taxed with the happy load of his imaginings (as we all are) in the act of walking to the lake; and what breadth the lake assumes, privy to a question that implies the workaday rhetorical (as any shout over the water might) and the unquestionably epistemological. The following ‘[H]ow incomprehensible//being has been to me/from the beginning—’ reads as beautifully modest and honest.

Re-reading the poem, we see how imperative that moment of modesty is, since the speaker’s tonal bent has its risks: there is, I think, both the sentimentalized move of ‘wept into my flesh’ and the punning at ‘lessoned’ to contend with. Yet gnosis in “Monastic” does a great deal of work towards rewarding such risks; because a reader realizes she is privy to a moment of real reflective rectitude, a move like ‘lessoned’ feels earnest, not cute. And the poem, therefore, nets the echo effect it seeks to earn in lines 10 and 22.

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FRESH LOOKS: Mark Strand’s “Nostalgia”

25 January 2012

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NOSTALGIA

The professors of English have taken their gowns
to the laundry, have taken themselves to the fields.
Dreams of motion circle the Persian rug in a room you were in.
On the beach the sadness of gramophones
deepens the ocean’s folding and falling.
It is yesterday. It is still yesterday.

So much of this piece seems to be about ‘dreams of motion’—there is perambulation implied or stated in every line, though it is not so leisurely as it is mesmerized—and even ‘mesmerism’ has too much agency to truly capture the state of semi-wakelessness that Strand crafts.

One moves through the piece, as I mentioned, in a kind of emotive haze whose disconnect is only heightened by the hard edges of certain phrases. Professors of English ‘tak[ing] their gowns/to the laundry’ ought to be a footfall on which the narrative of the poem could gather solid weight, but it is immediately undercut by the disembodiment of ‘have taken themselves to the fields’—as if the body, too, could be dropped somewhere and fetched later. The concreteness of ‘Persian rug’ and ‘gramophone[]‘ are likewise compromised (so to speak) by a non-sequitor change of scene; the ‘dreams of motion’ that might lift the moving pattern off the rug into ghostly pavanes; and an ocean whose actions more closely mimic those of a nightshirt than a liquid element.

Here again, an echo: this time of Dickinson’s [530]:

You cannot fold a Flood—
And put it in a Drawer—
Because the Winds would find it out—
And tell your Cedar Floor—

And while Strand’s poem doesn’t have the cheek of Dickinson’s, it surely shares [530]s mysterious ambient awareness—that is, the awareness of the material without mind.

The sixth line of the piece reads to me like a Jungian archetype: as though it must’ve been etched on consciousness for millennia previous to human conception, sharing space with the primordial ooze. Is this truly ‘nostalgia,’ I wonder? Has the speaker created a space of images worthy of redefining the nostalgic?

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FRESH LOOKS: James Wright’s “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio”

30 November 2011

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First, the poem:

AUTUMN BEGINS IN MARTINS FERRY, OHIO

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.

It’s heightened attention to the NFL this year that brought a very vague memory of this poem to mind, I think; as a piece, its overuse of abstract nouns makes for melodrama, as does its tendency to typify a crew of one-dimensional characters. More importantly, though, a few of the images that Wright crafts have both truth and power, and these color his overarching hyperbole, creating a scene that is so desperate in its pulsing neon that its plug nearly cries to be pulled.

I admit ignorance as to why Wright’s ‘[P]roud fathers are ashamed to go home’—perhaps the mechanism of their work, as stirred by the first stanza, is explanation; perhaps their hearts are with their sons on the field, having themselves passed out of ‘play.’ In any event, the visual of ‘Their women cluck[ing] like starved pullets’ is dead-on. From the front step to the driveway, this is the verifiable sound of the voice that wants to the ear that half-cares. ‘Pullets’ is a brilliant choice to this end: beyond setting the women at a certain age, it visually cues their thin, drawn-out, ‘pulled’ call. The ammo of this image almost rescues the broad (and therefore too vague) ‘[d]ying for love.’

It’s tough not to marvel at the gutsy ‘[t]herefore’ adverbial connector following: the fact that Wright sees a consequent connection between the menagerie of flash personages in the first eight lines and the scene in the final four speaks to his compelling imagination. So the boys’ beauty (are they so beautiful that an onlooker is drawn to kill himself? or is it beauty who wants to off herself, being bodied?) becomes the result of a love that is taciturn in father, desperate in mother, and this is a call to ‘[G]allop terribly against each others bodies.’ In terms of purity of metaphorical relation, I’m hard-pressed to find something more accurate than this description of how a tackle and end meet at the line, without real hope for advancement, one bucking north, the other south. Wright’s moments of inspired descriptive accuracy mean that—while I continue to question parts of his method—his poetic in “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” feels utterly achieved. So what if I don’t  like a wash of abstract nouns?

Thinking of football’s recent issues, from Mr. Paterno to Suh on 11/24 (by the way, check out Jeff MacGregor’s thoughtful piece on football violence here), there’s little doubt that aggression, metered anger, and denial play a part in our interest in footballing. Wright’s piece colors that contact, again, by lending lens to the urge to pummel what we would embrace.

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FRESH LOOKS: H.D.’s “Stars Wheel in Purple”

21 September 2011

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First, the poem:

STARS WHEEL IN PURPLE

Stars wheel in purple, yours is not so rare
as Hesperus, nor yet so great a star
as bright Aldeboran or Sirius,
nor yet the stained and brilliant one of War;

stars turn in purple, glorious to the sight;
yours is not gracious as the Pleiads are
nor as Orion’s sapphires, luminous;

yet disenchanted, cold, imperious face,
when all the others blighted, reel and fall,
your star, steel-set, keeps lone and frigid tryst
to freighted ships, baffled in wind and blast.

Along with six or seven of Tennyson’s poems and Dickinson’s [341], H.D.’s “Orchard” represented a seminal poetic moment in my teenage life. The vocabulary is strong, at times arresting (just try to pass over the encounter with ‘You have flayed us/With your blossoms’), the vocative powerful; but the speaker’s desire to be quit of loveliness (‘Do you, alone unbeautiful,/Son of the god,/Spare us from loveliness:’) was cinching—both repellant and wondrous to my very young sensibilities. A rather mindbending prospect: to importune what I imagined to be a satyr-god in a place with such rich abundance; and what was the offering? the prostrate body? was the harvest a gift of the speaker or the backdrop against which this entreaty took place? Who could want freedom from beauty? The air of the poem is so sumptuously thick that blearing seemed a necessary part of it.

“Stars Wheel in Purple” is the arctic version of “Orchard,” I think, and while it shows great restraint, it unpacks the product ‘spared from loveliness’ impressively.

I love the poise of H.D.’s music in this. While a rhyme scheme is not immediately apparent, there’s little doubt that ‘star,’ ‘War,’ ‘rare,’ and ‘are’ are placed with great purpose, as are the chilly ‘Sirius,’ ‘sapphires,’ ‘luminous,’ ‘tryst,’ ‘blast.’ The blank analytic of the speaker’s address—’yours is not so rare’ and ‘yours is not gracious as’—create the very image of Artemis in the high firs, both virginal and impassioned—well, why else is she so spurred on? And truly, by virtue of “Stars Wheel in Purple,” I realize just how much Aphrodite and Vulcan are plausible touchstones in “Orchard.”

So much happens in the last stanza of the piece, and one realizes he has been kept just short of icy until now: the pacing is a very slow—then urgent—slip into the embrace of polar waters. ‘Imperious’ is a bold term, and true even to the reader’s experience of reading “Stars Wheel in Purple”—what, suddenly the poem is in the thrall of this demiurge, so passed-off for seven lines, whether we knew she would have to be reckoned with or not?—this, and the purposeful jerk at ‘reel and fall’ (note the jarring lack of a comma here) and I realize I’m just a fish in jaws. There is a killing speed to how suddenly I’m overwhelmed by

your star, steel-set, keeps lone and frigid tryst
to freighted ships, baffled in wind and blast[,]

which is not so ‘unbeautiful’ as it is flattening. ‘[B]affled,’ indeed, in something just like ‘wind and blast.’ This poem is hard to rival.

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FRESH LOOKS: Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur”

17 August 2011

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As a reader, “God’s Grandeur” staggers me with its ‘bringing into being,’ immediately: first, an unflinching declarative, then the flame, then oil, blotted. Its writing has established a precedent for the statement and images it posits; I can follow the emergence of searing formation, having just borne witness.

This is the first of the poem’s many achievements.

There is something unmistakable about a Hopkins piece, once one has read him. His ‘sprung’ accent-based rhythm (especially heavy-stress feet like ‘Why do men then now not reck his rod?’) has long been sung, and one can see his willingness to rearrange sentence structure and cut prepositions as servant to his interest in several sonic tropes, cascading rhyme (‘men then’ or ‘bleared, smeared’) and hard monosyllables (‘wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell’) among them.  The lushness of his vocabulary would give the Maenads good call.  As well, the passion of his muse lends, to my taste, a very careful intelligence (check the concept of how greatness ‘gathers’ like ‘the ooze of oil/Crushed’) to the pure ecstasy of ‘shining from shook foil,’ which floors me every reading.

The payoff of Hopkins’ willingness to subjugate rhetoric is most clear in phrases like

And for all this, nature is never spent;
          There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

which claim both the raw edge of revelation’s immediacy, and its strange grace. In contemporary verse, a move like ‘deep down things’ (could it ever happen just like that) is a chest bump, a kind of mumbled expletive in the direction of ‘academy’ work, that always manages to simper a bit too self-reverentially. Its sincerity here is obvious, as is its inevitability.

In “God’s Grandeur,” as in a work like “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” the genius always feels tied to the mysticism of Hopkins’ viewpoint, and my natural romanticism sees his mind-blowing phrasings (remember ‘Turned for an exquisite smart,/have you!’?) as the abiding gift of a God granting his disciple superior singing tongue. The fact that many great artists are less than devout seems reason enough to doubt this, at least directly. Yet Hopkins’ openness to a realm beyond the palpable and pragmatic undoubtedly fosters roads into the Spirit, or into reckoning with matters of the spirit, that cannot be faked like a poem about, well, my most recent mobile phone call.

In the end, the meter of the poem is virtuosic, and its abiding sentiment—that, despite man’s recurrent lapses into ignorance, the clear workings of God that make the world ‘charged’ will not relent in their magical grace, with or without thanks—has lift, alongside clear originality of music and sensibility. What makes it great is Hopkins’ complete willingness to dissolve and disperse his intent into every fabric of its motion. A visionary will write a visionary’s poems, and a mystic hers; their ‘realness’ is felt as a pervasive sincerity, of which we see so little, these lean days.

Reflecting on Glück

10 May 2011

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Since the 1968 birth of her inaugural collection, Firstborn, Louise Glück has been writing the poetry of modern myth.  Ararat (1992) tells a demotic mythology of the modern family, and Meadowlands (1997) chronicles the quiet displacement of a modern marriage alongside the interior love story of Homer’s Odyssey.  But Glück’s Pulitzer Prize winning collection, The Wild Iris, is able to make much more from a modern mythology.  She is loyal to her naturalistic trope, but cultivates a garden, a co-creation between gardener and nature, with which she tells the myth of the soul as it lives, dies , and cements the beauty of what goes beyond existing as a ‘self,’ or an individual.

The poet’s voice mixes with the voices of flowers, the morning, with an unnamed god, and with the voices of the dead.  In the title poem, we see an iris bulb’s return from a winter under the earth as a return from death:

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

—the iris’ resurrection includes a push through the unbearable silence of frozen earth, and an entrance into something more than the state of selfhood.  The flower, reborn, is a soul that remembers what is outside of its daily self:

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.
Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Besides existing as a powerful precursor to the sentiment that Jean Valentine called the ‘door in the mountain,’ these lines suggest an awakening beyond the usual trappings of life, beyond the pain of being a ‘self.’ Helen Vender has called this voice ‘archetypal,’ and ‘mysteriously significant . . . [one] of spiritual prophecy.’

It is this kind of high poetic that begins by suspending the reader in a hammock of eerie beauty until he is primed for the death blow that Glück rarely fails to deliver—one immediately thinks, for example, of the devastating closes in her “Mock Orange,” “The Red Poppy,” and “Telescope.” Those who call ourselves Glück’s ‘fans’ can become dependent on this sharp deliverance, and are left with a feeling of confusion when Glück drapes us, instead, in the rural dailiness of more and more cold winters, dog-walking, deep shade, and dinners with wine—this is the milieu of her most recent book, A Village Life. 

The tenor of A Village Life, to this end, undermines the force of the primal question Glück asks in The Wild Iris: ‘Is it enough/only to look inward?’  While The Wild Iris reminds us of what is greater than our daily struggle, Glück’s latest collection binds the reader further to the pain of being an aging body, a person who must stay alive every day; where The Wild Iris dazzles us with the desperate romance of natural existence, A Village Life cracks us over the head with the vulgarities of generic dissatisfaction, or the pain the poet finds in the commonness of a much cruder garden:

The fountain rises at the center of the plaza:
on sunny days, rainbows in the piss of the cherub.

The difference between these two collections is, after all, the difference between a spiritual text and a daily journal.  Both kinds of writing can be applauded, but for readers of poetry—those who attempt to access the deep heart’s core—which is more important? and as Virginia Woolf queried, which sort of text could we sink to the bottom of the sea with, contentedly?

FRESH LOOKS: Seamus Heaney’s NORTH

29 April 2011

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If ever I swear off the larger part of contemporary poetry, figuring I’d be better served to read Macbeth for the twelfth time before laboring through another droll, uninspired, ironic, self-reflexive volume, I remind myself of a single thing: in 1975, Seamus Heaney’s North was brand new.

Because nearly all of the poems in North announce themselves with an intent to mean beyond the local (read: temporal), and are composed with such unerring virtuosity (check the pitch, balance, and, more importantly, the purport of “Sunlight,” for example), it’s strange to think of their potential ‘newness,’ ever. Instead, they act as immediate proof of Eliot’s position in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”—that, if the verse is true and numinous enough, the seas part both behind and before it—it has known Macbeth, and moves forward with the man in happy tow.

Therefore I ask myself, being so breathless in the presence of this text: what have I learned from loving North?

Most immediately, that all bets are off when dealing with a rare poetic intelligence. I winced at the repetition of ‘gleam’ and ‘black glacier’ across several of the poems in the book’s first section, only to end up wondering if the repetitive trope evinced more than just a navvy vocabulary. If the transposition of the latter phrase moves from, in “Funeral Rites”—

and the black glacier
of each funeral
pushed away [.]

to the eerie majesty of “Bog Queen”‘s

My sash was a black glacier
wrinkling, dyed weaves
and phoenician stitchwork
retted on my breasts’

soft moraines [.]

not only has my experience of the phrase expanded, but, in that expansion, become more boldly felt. Because Heaney has not given us easy declensions within which to fathom his ‘progress’—’black glacier’ as a funeral train or a risen woman’s furnishings both truck in ‘deep’ imagistic meanings—we’re left, as readers, to return to the poems individually, and place the image in the context of the pieces and the context of the volume; I’m given no luxury to abandon this floe because I’ve passed the poem that contains it.

Shortly, North also helps us see the difference between ‘local,’ I think, and ‘temporal.’ In “Bone Dreams” and (again) “Sunlight,” the workaday present participates in the cosmic by virtue of its stake in the True:

Now she dusts the board
with a goose’s wing,
now sits, broad-lapped,
with whitened nails

and measling shins:
here is a space
again, the scone rising
to the tick of two clocks [.]

—the ‘temporal,’ on the other hand, names a place and identifying objects (a rotary phone, a boombox) to earn itself a bogus stake in ‘Our Moment,’ as David Orr states. Again: the temporal seeks audience by virtue of its assertive ‘presence,’ while the local, like a Breughel piece, resonates without Now’s flimsy eddy.

Are there some questionable moments in the text? I think so; in the second half of North especially, Heaney’s overtly political pieces are prone to looser phraseology, and less diligence of image—one thinks of ‘[m]y poor little scapegoat,’ for example. That said, to go on listing the plaudits of this volume is not a difficult matter. More important for us as lovers of poetry is to recall that these moments of ecstasy and profundity, in the presence of actual art, are why we return to the well of verse. Small-time placement in contests, a nod across the gallery at some cocktail party by—what was his name?—these concerns are reduced to ash in the face of “Bog Queen” or “The Seed Cutters” or “The Grauballe Man.” The largeness of North is its special tonic; it nearly makes me believe I’ve got a sister or two in this contemporary mess I so lovingly deride.