<\/p>\n
C<\/font>. K. Williams has long been our bard of secret shame, of psychological rupture, of the gaffes and faux pas that illustrate in small the disaster of being human\u2014and who does not learn forgiveness by starting with venial sins? (You feel that he worships not Whitman but Erving Goffman.) Williams has remained a bleaker and more lurid version of Frost, with self-loathing added. His vignettes seem to occur by accident\u2014they just happen<\/i>, like the instigations of malign Fate. A child asks a grieving family an unforgivable question; the poet sees a deformed thrush the mother bird will soon abandon; something unsaid passes between a man and woman on the M\u00e9tro: such moments lie outside the customary, cushioned life. In that instant of guilt or mortality or regret, Williams has discovered his ground \u2014he dwells on things, then grinds them into poems.<\/p>\n The tabloid epiphanies in Wait<\/i> sometimes occur in hyper-clarified vision:<\/a>[1]<\/a><\/p>\n \nIt must recently have been left there; \nastonished and disconsolate.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n A poet elsewhere so depressing shouldn\u2019t be this droll and insightful, though Williams is not simply Thurber in tragic mode. At best, he records his pocket dramas, finds some small lesson, and leaves it there. Despite the hypertensive, cobra-like lines now characteristic and even tiresome (if no longer monogamously employed), he\u2019s old fashioned enough to like homilies, to find human behavior both fascinating and repellent. We\u2019re so skittish now about judging people, it\u2019s refreshing when someone breaks the taboo, even if Pope\u2019s Moral Essays<\/i> will never make the bestseller list again.<\/p>\n Williams still takes adolescent delight in provoking the reader\u2019s disgust: \u201cA basset hound with balls\/ so heavy they hang\/ a harrowing half\/ inch from the pavement.\u201d Harrowing<\/i>? He could at times be mistaken for Frederick Seidel, our other Tacitean poet of late empire (soon the dog is licking its balls; and then, like an Annunciation, a Ducati motorcycle appears). The weakness of these new poems lies not in their voyeuristic fancies, their relish in shock and discomfort, but in turning that social eye to Public Issues, to Man\u2019s Inhumanity to Man. Whether Martin Luther King revisits the slums, or Dostoevsky is scolded for his anti-Semitism, or the Great Blackstone saws a lady in half (\u201cwhen we learned that real men were supposed to hurt women\u201d\u2014yes, real men in top hats, waving magic wands), the poems trade all their psychological subtlety for a little retro breast- and brow-beating.<\/p>\n When he\u2019s not standing on Adrienne Rich\u2019s soapbox (\u201cnuclear rockets aimed at your head, racism, sexism, contempt for the poor\u201d\u2014you\u2019d eat a cake of soap to make him stop), Williams is illustrating some lesson from the Jorie Graham School of Subtlety: \u201cDon\u2019t we know yet that history\/ spins like a compass needle\/ but quivers remorselessly into place?\/ How can a child not cry to the night?\/ How can the prescient dog not howl?\u201d How can the prescient dog not howl?<\/i> Only Shr\u00f6dinger\u2019s cat knows for sure, and I confess I was laughing too hard to ask it. A few poems on the Iraq War have been written in PowerPoint, like most war poems these days. You wish the poet were confident enough not to settle his arguments the way the hammer settles them with the nail.<\/p>\n Williams\u2019s writing can be so acute, so sharp-edged and darkly humane (he\u2019s as gloomy as Robinson, that psychologist of American pastoral), it\u2019s surprising that his new poems are blandly indifferent to style, as if he\u2019d traded poetry for the talking cure. What but poetic deafness could make so many passages read like sociology texts (\u201cThat what is often specified by the inheritors of those thrice-removed sanctifications, that certain other groups,\/ by virtue of being in even potential disagreement \u2026\u201d), or literary journalism of a paralyzing dullness (\u201cDillard is erudite, tender\/ and wise, and she can be funny\u201d), or the doltish burbling of airline magazines (\u201cI came to love Mexico when I lived there, the gentleness of its people, its prodigious history and culture\u201d)? Too many lines have been scraped together from pointless, stuttering lists of synonyms (\u201cThat dip in existence, that hollow, that falling-off place, cliff or abyss\/ where silence waits, lurks, hovers, beneath world, beneath sense\u201d), as if the drudges at Roget\u2019s<\/i> would otherwise be unemployed.<\/p>\n A dispiriting number of these poems have been provoked by literature. I\u2019m glad Williams can get worked up about Dostoevsky\u2019s sins this late in the day, but only in the chaos and belittlement of memory does this poet find the petty cruelties, the failures of charity, that make his poems distinctive. He stands before the decaying wreck of the ocean liner on which he once sailed to France:<\/p>\n \nAt Le Havre we were out of scale with everything; Williams draws our eyes to the scene, and lets us work out the rest.<\/p>\n T<\/font>he title of Tony Hoagland\u2019s new book, Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty<\/i>, is the funniest thing about it.<\/a>[2]<\/a> Along with Billy Collins, Dean Young, and a giggle of others, Hoagland has thrived among the gentle practitioners of gentle humor, sometimes with a gentle dash of the gently surreal, who have given American verse a New Age school of stand-up comedians. (Their motto: Humor, or else<\/i>.) His new poems celebrate that great American religion, shopping, and that great American temple, the shopping mall. The art of American consumption was part of our literature long before Babbitt<\/i> and The Theory of the Leisure Class<\/i>\u2014Henry James knew all about the golden bowls of the Gilded Age, Trollope\u2019s mother went broke starting a Cincinnati bazaar (right idea, wrong location), Mrs. Lincoln\u2019s dresses almost bankrupted her husband, and even Whitman was astonished by the ready commerce and \u201cgay-dress\u2019d crowds\u201d along Chestnut Street. You might say that the subject of Americans and what they buy, from Thomas Jefferson\u2019s rare books (or, when he went on a spree, the whole Louisiana Purchase) to O. J. Simpson\u2019s Bruno Maglis and Carrie Bradshaw\u2019s Manolo Blahniks, is an embarrassment of riches, or just a bunch of crap: \u201cthe little ivory forks at picnics and green toy dinosaurs in playrooms everywhere;\/\/ the rooks and pawns of cheap $4.95 chess sets made in the People\u2019s Republic of China.\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s not a lot to say about American consumerism that wasn\u2019t said by Veblen, even if shopping is a Darwinian metaphor for the manners and mores of American life. Hoagland wisely turns his eye to all those lives impoverished\u2014or, who knows, made infinitely richer\u2014by that endless buying, buying, buying. Still, when he thunders on about the \u201clate-twentieth-century glitterati party\/ of striptease American celebrity\u201d he sounds as if he\u2019s channeling Billy Graham channeling Billy Sunday. Denouncing Britney Spears is like invading Rhode Island.<\/p>\n Hoagland has a superficial ease and charm\u2014he\u2019s likable, and his poems are likable, but they\u2019re often less than they promise. He\u2019s a wonderful collector of the junk with which Americans furnish their lives, but it\u2019s hard to turn junk into poems. Hoagland is the Updike of American trash, forgetting nothing\u2014but he hasn\u2019t figured out how to recycle rubbish into art. All too soon, Spears will seem dated as a Stutz Bearcat or a man shouting \u201cTwenty-three skidoo!\u201d There\u2019s a quieter and more unsettled poet inside all this bric-\u00e0-brac:<\/p>\n \npried off a slab of bark \n\u201cThe ones who will survive,\u201d he told us, Hoagland doesn\u2019t quite know what to do with the complicated feelings this evokes\u2014it\u2019s smug for him to say, \u201cThat was Lesson Number 4\/ in The Green Beret Book of Childrearing<\/i>.\u201d (Things could have been worse\u2014he might have turned the scene into Deliverance<\/i> 2<\/i><\/font>.) In the silent desperation here, the real subject might have been the father\u2019s misplaced expression of love.<\/p>\n Hoagland is skittish about love, though he knows that romance is often absurd and comedy the catharsis of fear. His hymn to American courtship scares me:<\/p>\n \nIt is just our second date, and we sit down on a bench, \nand if I were a bull penguin right now I would lean over \u00a0 This goes on to peacocks and walking-stick insects (\u201cshe might\/ insert her hypodermic proboscis delicately into my neck\u201d), but you get the idea: Man is the animal who spends a lot of time thinking he\u2019s not an animal. Like so much of Hoagland\u2019s work, the poem softens into sentimental mush; yet for a moment the poet has seen the darkness in love, the animal passions released and endured.<\/p>\n These whimsical, mildly satirical poems about modern anomie, composed with far too much corn syrup and partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, want to rouse primal fears, then comfort the reader with a warm glass of milk. Sometimes this arch joker forgets the point of humor\u2014a poem on the D.C.<\/font> sniper, which starts with the mystery of God (that riddle ever invoked when life is cruel or unfair), comes all too close to ridiculing the dead. Next he\u2019ll be making fun of Holocaust victims.<\/p>\n K<\/font>eith Douglas was killed by mortar fire outside a French village three days after D-Day. His unit of Sherwood Rangers had taken casualties on Gold Beach, the day of the landing. A student at Oxford, Captain Douglas joined the army at nineteen, just after the declaration of war. Though he had survived the murderous tank warfare of North Africa, he confessed to a friend that he would not return alive from Europe.<\/p>\n Douglas was a poet in the period style, or in a number of period styles (his tutor at Oxford was Edmund Blunden, and his apprentice work has the musty whiff of Georgian verse). The poems vary wildly, a job lot of gestures and rhetoric more borrowed than invented\u2014the early verse suffers from too much moonlight and too many dead girls, and even the later sneaks in a unicorn or two. When there\u2019s a riveting image (\u201cThat church, amputated by high explosive,\/ Where priests no more lift up their murmurous Latin\u201d), Douglas is soon dragging in princes, a peasant lass, and the moon (that \u201cmagic painter\u201d). Poets are stuck with their period, but what Auden made of that period was far more cunning and irresponsible and subversive.<\/p>\n War transfigures the artist even while trying to kill him. What the shock of combat teaches can swiftly be lost if the poet yields to noble rhetoric or regurgitated patriotism. War\u2019s random violence brought out a more serious and sardonic poet in Douglas: \u201cJohn Anderson, a scholarly gentleman\/ advancing with his company in the attack\/ received some bullets through him as he ran.\u201d The cruelty of the matter-of-fact sounds like John Crowe Ransom, though shortly the poem begins to gush, and then Zeus arrives to turn it into heroic elegy\u2014yet that suspicion toward the heroic casts a shadow over the rest. The raw brutality and hardship of the Egyptian campaign gave Douglas a subject not dragged from books or fantasy. Dead soldiers<\/p>\n These canine Valkyries fascinated the young officer (the \u201cwild dog finding meat in a hole\/ is a philosopher\u201d)\u2014he even drew sketches of the beasts. Soldiers are often uneasy with their own detachment; death at first seems an overwhelming fate, then just an unhappy accident, the dead to be avoided if possible.<\/p>\n You need to go a long way to find the good lines in these poems, and when you do they\u2019re surrounded by bad ones. Douglas\u2019s hobbled style never found a sustaining language\u2014you might say that clumsiness came naturally to him, though most poets have to labor for their graces. The erotic undercurrent to his descriptions promised a poetry more subtly pointed, more sensual and disturbing, than any he lived to write. The scene is an Egyptian tea garden:<\/p>\n \nslips in a morsel of ice-cream; her hands \nA cotton magnate, an important fish The metaphor is overelaborate, but the development of observation owes something to \u201cSweeney among the Nightingales.\u201d<\/p>\n Douglas wrote only a few poems after returning to England in 1943, where the Rangers trained for D-Day in amphibious tanks, with mock landings on the British coast. He looked after his men, took tea in Cambridge, and occasionally went to a dance. He also worked on his memoir of the Battle of Alamein and engaged in a hopeless correspondence with a young married wom- an he fancied. Perhaps he\u2019d written all the poems he had in him to write.<\/p>\n Simplify Me When I\u2019m Dead<\/i>, a reprint of the selection made by Ted Hughes almost half a century ago, is a convenient abridgement of a poet who almost never wrote a good poem, but it should never have been weighed down with Hughes\u2019s charmless, huckstering introduction.<\/a>[3]<\/a> The book is desperate for a few notes, which could have been borrowed from The Complete Poems<\/i> (1987), a book with a longer and more acute introductory essay by none other than Ted Hughes.<\/p>\n The poetry of World War II<\/font> has suffered critically in comparison with that of the Great War, though the cause isn\u2019t clear. Sassoon, Rosenberg, Brooke, Gurney, and others have their gifts, but except for Wilfrid Owen none merits close attention, and even Owen is an acquired taste. The war poetry of Randall Jarrell, Richard Wilbur, and Anthony Hecht is more devastating as art, and to those soldier poets of the later war should be added the civilians W. H. Auden and Robert Lowell, the latter a conscientious objector. (Among poems, Four Quartets<\/i> and The Pisan Cantos<\/i> should not be excluded.) Perhaps it\u2019s time to reexamine the old prejudice, which was a prejudice before many of the best poems of that war were even written.<\/p>\n D<\/font>on Paterson\u2019s poems are nervy, prickly, sometimes elliptical\u2014oh, and did I mention they\u2019re Scottish? When so many poets try to be plain as a tire iron, plain as a jackhammer, it\u2019s a pleasure to have to work out meanings, always presuming there\u2019s something to be worked out. Paterson is loyal to the traditions without being slavish about them\u2014he likes the binding obligation of rhyme and meter, but wants license to kick up a little dust now and then. For a poet so often in debt to Frost and Hardy, he\u2019s mockingly up to date.<\/p>\n Rain<\/i> is composed in a minor key\u2014moody, elegiac, the poems lie in the shadow of things not always mentioned.<\/a>[4]<\/a> Paterson\u2019s restless new book is full of fables and allegories, with a few songs that live in the misty border country of the ballads. He has pared away the complications of feeling in Landing Light<\/i> (2006), as if simplicity offered both comfort and protection from death. The new style comes at a price, but it\u2019s odd the price should so often be great dollops of sentiment. A man sets up a swing for his boys:<\/p>\n \nI hung the rope up in the air The poem is more devious than this (in parts perhaps impenetrable), its subject choosing not to have another child. Paterson likes leaving the moral or lesson implicit\u2014his lines hang there, strangely unfulfilled. Yet the sing-song meter and dimestore rhymes keep dragging poems with the mystery of Hardy back to the children\u2019s verse of de la Mare. The questions of innocence and experience might evaporate if the sentiment didn\u2019t leak even into the verse more adult: \u201cThe sea reached up invisibly\/ to milk the ache out of the sky,\u201d \u201cOne thing makes a mirror in my eyes\/ then I paint it with the tear to make it bright.\u201d The book ought to come with linen handkerchiefs from the broken mills of Glasgow or Aberdeen. When does the faux-na\u00eff<\/i> become simply naive? You can try so hard for simplicity you turn your poems to porridge.<\/p>\n Paterson\u2019s overlong elegy to the poet Michael Donaghy, who died at fifty, is written in stately pentameter, withheld in judgment, and desolate in reminiscence, but he keeps milking the grief as if it were a cow. The night<\/p>\n \nreached into the room The last image, of the darkness getting darker, doesn\u2019t need the \u201cmurmuring books\u201d and the thickening pathos that precede it. A prefatory apologia in Scots (Paterson writes well in the old literary language) is more moving in four lines than the elegy itself.<\/p>\n Just when you think you have this poet\u2019s measure, he\u2019ll do something loopy, like an ode to a young goddess of techno\u2014it\u2019s an extended joke, stuffed with electronic-music jargon and the results of too much Googling, the sort of thing Paul Muldoon might have dashed off at a bus stop. (In Muldoon fashion, Paterson later pulls thirty-five renku out of a hat.) Don\u2019t try Natalie Beridze\u2019s tunes, however, unless you have a hankering for robo-hymns and techno-Muzak. You\u2019re delighted that a poet would think of such nonsense\u2014then you\u2019re half sorry he did.<\/p>\n Paterson, who moonlights as poetry editor for a London publisher, has translated Rilke\u2019s Sonnets to Orpheus<\/i>, written books of aphorisms, and in recent years been drenched with a shower of awards. He\u2019s as protean as many British poets\u2014they write plays, libretti, novels, translations, songs (you\u2019re surprised they haven\u2019t been asked to rewrite traffic laws or contribute the occasional slogan to a Marmite campaign). In the compact literary world of the United Kingdom, even if not so united any more, the opportunities and commissions can be distracting.<\/p>\n The better poems here, like \u201cThe Bathysphere\u201d and \u201cThe Lie,\u201d create an allegorical world that turns ours topsy-turvy. They build their mysteries slowly and allow the reader no way to escape their crushing conclusions. \u201cThe Lie\u201d might have been written by Kafka\u2014\u201cI\u2019d risen a full hour\/ before the house had woken to make sure\/ that everything was in order with The Lie.\u201d There the poet pays his debts to literature in order to make something entirely his own.<\/p>\n T<\/font>he scene might have come out of Chekhov, it\u2019s so touching and strange. The aged poet, confined now to a wheelchair, sees across an airport lounge a woman he\u2019d lusted after sixty years before (Chekhov would have made that a railway waiting-room). Wrinkled now, \u201ctreble-chinned,\u201d she has lost all the unbearable beauty that once so inflamed him. She too is confined to a chair. They sit together, ruined by time, exchanging the nothings of conversation\u2014and yet in him a familiar heat begins to stir.<\/p>\n The poems in White Egrets<\/i> show Derek Walcott\u2019s usual command and authority, however weakened the poet by the terrible roil of age, by the \u201cquiet ravages of diabetes.\u201d<\/a>[5]<\/a> The years have stripped him of some of the arrogance that at times made his verse an exercise in armor plating:<\/p>\n The lines are still deliciously rich, but the sea grapes and the flame trees and the rusted port are on standing order from the local prop warehouse. His familiar scenes have come to resemble Potemkin villages.<\/p>\n Walcott\u2019s new poems fall easily into his resonant murmur (occasionally snoring or wheezing now), knitted in rhyme falling often into quatrains, tightened into pentameter, and then unknotted again. At eighty, a poet has every reason to survey his past, marking the toll paid in loss and regret, the dead loves and dead friends roughening the memory, when he can recall their names. (He finally realizes that he\u2019s a terrible painter\u2014the painter is always the last to know.) However much he may hope to live \u201cbeyond desires and beyond regrets,\u201d that peace seems not a day closer than death.<\/p>\n Whenever a poem starts to flag, Walcott pastes in lush strips of Morris wallpaper, natural description so deliriously gaudy you forget it\u2019s just pretty nonsense. It hardly matters if the poem is set in Stockholm, London, Barcelona, Pittsburgh, Amsterdam, on his own Caribbean island, or in the hill cities of Italy:<\/p>\n One landscape looks awfully like another in a world reduced to a single glossy issue of National Geographic<\/i>.<\/p>\n Perhaps too much of this book worries the same quarrels that have marked this long career, quarrels now like superannuated hounds drowsing by the winter hearth: the seductive tradition of English literature vs. the artist\u2019s necessary originality; hatred of empire vs. respect for old ways now lost; the longing for travel vs. love of his small island. The arguments were never won or lost, just overtaken by a different world. Walcott\u2019s verse lives for the antique regimens of the Cold War (his history book stops short around 1960). People worry about a lot more than the British Empire these days.<\/p>\n A poet of great gifts can make all sorts of mistakes and not fail, while a poet of mediocre talent can do almost everything right and not succeed. Perhaps Walcott has earned the right to slip in a few flat passages and overextended metaphors. Or to drop into preachy editorials (\u201cI watched the doomed acres\/ where yet another luxury hotel will be built\/ with ordinary people fenced out\u201d). Or to indulge in giddy Byronic rhymes like \u201close her\/ Siracusa,\u201d or \u201cdressmaker\/ Jamaica.\u201d I wish he had long ago retired that word \u201cempire\u201d (once more the schoolroom map is red with the old British possessions), wish that in almost every book the flash of the sea weren\u2019t compared to coins or the surface to a sheet of tin or the flight of birds to arrows\u2014I thought this time he\u2019d neglected the last, but there it is on the final page. In one short sequence, an egret devours ticks with an \u201celectric stab,\u201d has \u201cstabbing questions\u201d and a \u201cstabbing head,\u201d and will soon be \u201cstabbing at worms.\u201d<\/p>\n Solemn, stately, by turns guarded and grandiose, this is verse of an old-time eloquence, tormented by the emptiness such moody sonorities fill, since every bellow is now a bellow against death. White Egrets<\/i> is Walcott\u2019s best book in a long while, precisely because he has nothing left to prove, the writing now just the medium for mortal restlessness, a withering record of the humilities and humiliations of age. These may be the last songs of a David now heavy with years, the man from Gath a distant memory, and the old goat longing for pale-eyed beauties to keep him warm.<\/p>\n A<\/font>nne Carson\u2019s new book in a box carries all her rattletrap learning, her risky originality, her peculiar voice infused with the gravitas of the Greeks and the kookiness of the Jazz Age (if she\u2019s not the Medea of contemporary poetry, she\u2019s the Betty Boop). Carson is a nonesuch, an unconventional\u2014you\u2019re never sure what she\u2019ll do next, only that it will be riveting and fatiguing by turns, or perhaps both at once (some of her work rivals those early Warhol films whose tedium drove the audience nearly to suicide).<\/p>\n Nox<\/i> weighs two pounds, is thick as a volume of Proust, and comes in a specially made clamshell case.<\/a>[6]<\/a> This replica of the scrapbook memorial Carson constructed for her brother, who died a decade ago, consists of almost two hundred pages pasted together accordion style. If you\u2019re not careful, it will leap from your hands and go spilling down the stairs like a Slinky. On the surface, Nox<\/i> is a meditation on Catullus\u2019s Carmen 101, which ends triumphantly, sadly, \u201cave atque vale.\u201d The book progresses by fits and starts, her private recollections triggered by a word-by-word lexicon of the Latin text, supplemented by fragments of letters, torn snapshots, postage stamps, pencil rubbings, and crude drawings. Every patch of prose, and the photographs and whatnot besides, has been pasted or taped or stapled to the page, at least photographically. For a hundred bucks, you can get the limited edition\u2014if it offers real Scotch tape and real staples, you should snap it up.<\/p>\n Carson tells us only so much about her difficult brother (he fled a prison sentence, traveled on a false passport, died under an assumed name), as if there were privacies that could not be breached. Like a good classical scholar, she knows how suggestive the fragment can be. Coleridge knew it; Pound knew it\u2014indeed, it has become an avant-garde clich\u00e9, yet we have to rediscover it every few years. The poem records the losses suffered even during life, when people are driven apart by their own strange whirlwinds.<\/p>\n Carson rakes over the sparse material remains of her shared past. The deckle-edged Kodak snaps, some cut or mutilated, are ordinary and powerful: one shows the wintry yard of a cottage, her mother and the two children standing stiffly in the cold. The photographer\u2019s shadow falls\u2014forlornly? domineeringly?\u2014upon the snow. Is that the father, hardly more than shadow here? Her memories are cautious, as if she doesn\u2019t want to give too much away (what is given can no longer be hoarded). History, she muses, is always something survived. The overpowering loss is made no better by knowledge that any literary memorial must be inadequate, that healing gestures do not heal.<\/p>\n Carson is a canny, thinky writer (in the past she has often out-thought herself), who at times has all too much to say about what she says. If one of her themes is the grief of history, the other is muteness, the silence of the past beneath her brother\u2019s long silences. Even as an adult, she hung on his every word, like a younger sister still lost in hero worship. The piecemeal dialogue she records is strange, almost oracular, the torn letters part ransom note, part evidence of terror or fury (history is salvage law, too). Carson has left her misspellings and mistypings intact, as if the rawness of sorrow were more important than correction. The hesitations and interruptions and irritations of this strange book serve like Moby-Dick<\/i>\u2019s passages of cetology\u2014delay is power.<\/p>\n A long book that offers only a dozen pages of poetry ought to feel empty (there\u2019s probably more Latin than English here), yet Nox<\/i> is impossibly full. The lexicon entries, though the reader may be tempted to skip them, become a kind of found poetry, a meditation on meaning, on ambiguity, on transience, and even on love, for who looks so closely except in a kind of rapture? Catullus wrote Carmen 101 for his own brother, who died in the Troad, the site of the ruins of Troy. Though the Roman poet visited the grave, Carson didn\u2019t enjoy even that consolation\u2014her brother had been dead weeks before she heard, his ashes already scattered on the sea. The book tries to make up for all those absences and lacunae, a cenotaph for the uncomfortable, unhappy man whose life brought suffering and whose death, suffering once more.<\/p>\n For decades Carson apparently tried to translate the Catullus (drafts are pasted to some of these pages), but Nox<\/i> turns the raw matter of grief into a meta-translation. Often with avant-garde work, the formal fuss and bother can\u2019t conceal the humdrum, homely sentiments at heart. With too much experimental poetry, where there\u2019s smoke, there\u2019s \u2026 well, just more smoke. Carson\u2019s poetry has always suffered from a weird affectlessness (in readings she employs that as a superb form of deadpan), yet here the flat, toneless lines, laid out like Wittgenstein\u2019s Tractatus<\/i>, have the exhaustion of grief endured. This deeply personal, dark meditation on death and memory justifies the nuttier projects on which Carson has lavished her talents. The final page is a smeared and illegible scrap that seems to be another draft of the translation denied us\u2014it looks like a tombstone half eroded by time. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n Notes<\/b> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On Wait<\/i> by C. K. 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\nOn the sidewalk in front
\nof a hairdressers\u2019 supply store
\nlay the head of a fish,
\nlargish, pointy, perhaps a pike\u2019s.<\/p>\n
\nits scales shone and its visible eye
\nhad enough light left in it
\nso it looked as they will for a while<\/p>\n
\nThat such a monster could be lifted by mere waves
\nand in the storm that hit us halfway across
\ntossed left and right until we vomited
\nseemed a violation of some natural law.<\/p>\n
\nwhen a swarm of tiny tugs nudged like piglets
\nat the teat, the towering mass of us in place,
\nall the continent of Europe looked small.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nAnd when we were eight, or nine,
\nour father took us back into the Alabama woods,
\nfound a rotten log, and with his hunting knife<\/p>\n
\nto show the hundred kinds of bugs and grubs
\nthat we would have to eat in time of war.<\/p>\n
\nlooking at us hard,
\n\u201care the ones who are willing do [sic<\/i>] anything.\u201d
\nThen he popped one of those pale slugs
\ninto his mouth and started chewing.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nholding hands, not looking at each other,<\/p>\n
\nand vomit softly into the mouth of my beloved.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nrest in the sanitary earth perhaps
\nor where they died, no one has found them
\nor in their shallow graves the wild dog
\ndiscovered and exhumed a face or a leg
\nfor food: the human virtue round them
\nis a vapour tasteless to a dog\u2019s chops.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nSlyly her red lip on the spoon<\/p>\n
\nwhite as a milky stone, white submarine
\nfronds, sink with spread fingers, lean
\nalong the table, carmined at the ends.<\/p>\n
\nwith great eyepouches and a golden mouth
\nthrough the frail reefs of furniture swims out
\nand idling, suspended, stays to watch.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nI spread the feet two yards apart
\nand hammered down the pegs
\nfilled up the holes and stamped the dirt
\naround its skinny legs<\/p>\n
\nand fixed the yellow seat
\nthen stood back that I might admire
\nmy handiwork complete.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nswitching off the mirrors in their frames
\nand undeveloping your photographs;
\nit gently drew a knife across the threads
\nthat tied your keepsakes to the things they kept;
\nit slipped into a thousand murmuring books
\nand laid a black leaf next to every white;
\nit turned your desk-lamp off, then lower still.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nDown the Conradian docks of the rusted port,
\nby gnarled sea grapes whose plates are caked with grime,
\nto a salvo of flame trees from the old English fort,
\nhe waits, the white spectre of another time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nRoads shouldered by enclosing walls with narrow
\ncobbled tracks for streets, those hill towns with their
\nstamp-sized squares and a sea pinned by the arrow
\nof a quivering horizon, with names that never wither
\nfor centuries and shadows that are the dial of time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nGo to the top of the document.<\/font><\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n