Geoffrey Hill’s handsome and brutish new poems are fragments of his old covenant with language: in Canaan the rough verse measures a private poetry in public themes.[1] The lowlands of Canaan were promised the Israelites before their forty-year diet of manna (how dreadful the stuff must have tasted), the land of redemption Moses could gesture toward but never reach. Redemption is not the subject of Hill’s poetry so much as its sin (his difficulty is his greatest conceit): he is one of the last poets to believe language is the proper site of faith, that nothing except language will redeem the betrayals of the tongue.

Aspiring Grantham
rises above itself.
Tall churches wade the fen
on their stilts of glass.

Crowned Ely stands beset
by winds of straw-burning,
by the crouched run of flame.
Cambridge lies dark, and dead

predestined Elstow
where Bunyan struck his fear—
flint creed, tinder of wrath—
to flagrant mercies.

This bleak vision is called “Dark-Land,” and few readers would know the term from Pilgrim’s Progress (“I am of Dark-land,” said Valiant-for-Truth) if Hill hadn’t thoughtfully (and perversely) used it elsewhere as an epigraph. The thicket of required facts only begins in Grantham being the birthplace of Margaret Thatcher (daughter of a shopkeeper and so rising above her station) as well as site of one of the finest English medieval churches; Ely, in the middle of East Anglian fens (itself an island—eel island—before the fens were drained), the last place of resistance to the Norman conquest, is dominated by its Gothic cathedral; Elstow was Bunyan’s birthplace. Through such concealed facts the poem’s drive toward order accumulates; from the darkness of the present, they recall the revivals and religious awakenings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The modern landscape is scoured and beleaguered, old religion wiped clean for “national heritage,” striving mercantile towns more honored than ancient sites of worship. If a preacher like Bunyan strikes a spark in the surrounding night, the mercies are apt to be flagrant; but Hill has been a poet for whom a dark pun is a source of light.

The unlikely juxtaposition of terms in “Mysticism and Democracy” argues (as did the scholar Rufus Jones in a book of that title) that the modern democratic instinct developed in those religious revivals (self-governing churches becoming a microcosm of populist democracy), that democracy was a belief mystical in character. Canaan is a series of braided sequences on the body politic, the lines sometimes fragmentary, the sequences divided against themselves: the scattered parts of “To the High Court of Parliament,” “Mysticism and Democracy,” “Dark-Land,” and “Parentalia” are the limbs of Osiris, and the faith (and finicky trust) of readers must restore them to a living whole.

Hill honors those martyred for politics: “De Jure Belli ac Pacis” (the title of Grotius’s famous tract, which formed the basis of international law) is dedicated to one of the conspirators in the July plot against Hitler.

The people moves as one spirit unfettered
claim our assessors of stone.
When the nations
fall dispossessed such conjurings possess them,
elaborate barren fountains, projected
aqueducts
where water is no longer found.
Where would one find Grotius for that matter,
the secular justice clamant among psalms,
huge-fisted visionary Comenius … ?
Could none predict these haughty

degradations
as now your high-strung
martyred resistance serves
to consecrate the liberties of Maastricht?

Though the Maastricht treaty, setting terms for European union, is the proper end of the last war, “liberties” is cruelly ambiguous. The merging of Europe is also a loss of identity; and if the resistance of von Haeften and others was “high-strung,” they were themselves “high-strung” by piano wire at their executions. Hill finds his faith deep in the phrase, in those assessors of stone that might be gravestone or monument.

I have lingered over the snarled possibility of such lines because Hill’s poetry withholds its meanings out of charity, out of respect, as if only the student of the word deserved revelation of the Word. In our lethal time, poetry is the liturgy of a dead language, and Hill’s invocation of religious revivals past calls for the resurrection of a tongue now divided by its tongues, even as politicians make louder and lying obeisance to the past (the Bible has become a real-estate map). The damned ambitions of such language have fatal grandeur, most evident in Hill’s portrait of the forsaken beauty of English landscape, where rain

streams on half-visible clatter of the wind
lapsing and rising,
that clouds the pond’s green mistletoe of

spawn,
seeps among nettlebeds and rust-brown sorrel,
perpetual ivy burrowed by weak light,
makes carved shapes crumble… .

Some of these poems were published prematurely in New & Collected Poems (1992), and the cunning revisions and additions have sharpened their discontents (a reader may amuse himself at thought of this poet, who so hates to revise in public, revising in public). At times the broken phrasings sink into the fens—Hill is too eager a Valiant-for-Truth, too self-pleased a prophet without honor (as if the difficulty of his poetry were a vengeance on his slack-jawed readers). This is a cost some readers will bear for the barbed wire of such elegies and addresses; such cautious, cautionary verse tangled in Bible and classic; the compact religious ghosts of his first book of short poems for almost two decades.

Rich, quarrelsome (meaning forever contending with meaning), laden with its own soiled pleasures, Hill’s poetry is the major achievement of late twentieth-century verse. If it is also at times indrawn, obdurate past reason, sneering at “vacancy’s rabble,” a public poetry without a public, that is a judgment on our time (Hill is so high minded, you wish once in a while he’d succumb to low temptations). His sedimentary skills have troubled English poetry for almost half a century, and Canaan is one of the few serious books we will have to mark the millennium.

The Errancy is Jorie Graham’s weakest and most dispiriting book, the tics and fussiness of her recent style become nothing more than style (many poets praise Graham for her ambition, but ambition is not a classy word for achievement), as if she had forgotten that rendering so minutely her hither-dither, helter-skelter thinking had a point: to call into question the way a poem fixes perception.[2]

And the frontier where the notes pulse,

fringe, then fray
the very same stillness we place our outlines
in, the very same one we have to breathe,

and flare our tiny nets of words
into (who’s there?)(what do you hear?)(what

hear?)(still
there?)—the very same—we listen in there—
the zero glistens—the comma holds—
flames behind where the siren goes off,
where someone is killed but only by accident so

you are free to cross the street now—
I watch the lovers a long time—
they kiss as if trying to massacre

difference… .

Errancy is the state of error, though it looks like a temp agency for clumsy typists. Here the buttonholing parentheses, the hacked-off line breaks, the italics and breathless dashes all contribute to a taxonomy of emphasis far beyond the requirements (it’s just a humdrum day in a city plaza). Half the poems end with a dash, an ellipsis, a question, or nothing at all; some have passages where every line is a new stanza. Her armory of rhetorical and typographical effect also includes the lacuna (her most devious device, for a word that refuses to be called forth), rhetorical questions, little oh’s of exclamation, and the long dramatic space (“And then no sound”).

Punctuation is frustrating and limiting for a poet who wants to take poems beyond the pieties of the past, but Graham’s devices (often just a housebroken version of avant- garde writing) are reminiscent, not of e e cummings, whose effects were jokey and painterly, but of the forgotten José Garcia Villa, who wrote countless poems where every word was separated by a comma (as well as a poem consisting of nothing but commas). Graham’s major theme is the immanence of the ordinary, but does the ordinary require quite such devout effusion, such faked urgency? She’s newly taken with guardian angels—there’s a party downstairs, and upstairs an angel is arranging things:

the honeycombing
thoughts are felt to dialogue, a form of self-
congratulation, no?, or is it suffering? I’m

a bit
dizzy up here rearranging things,
they will come up here soon, and need

a setting for their fears,
and loves, an architecture for their

evolutionary
morphic needs… .

To dialogue? Their morphic needs? Suddenly you’re watching a version of It’s a Wonderful Life where Clarence has become a follower of Derrida. Too often Graham’s wild means conceal all-too-sentimental ends.

Graham has been one of the most rashly daring contemporary poets (she’s the Evel Knievel of odd stunts), but as the praise has gotten louder the poetry has gotten worse. The new poems often begin in trivial domestic experience (being stuck in traffic, say), but soon they’re spiraling off into tedious immensities and vacancies, the empty- headed philosophizing that disfigured the verse of James Dickey and Robert Penn Warren. Even by her own standards, the writing is sometimes dreadful: “wielding utter particularity in this pregnant bagfulness,” “crustaceous mylar day must nibble at, gum at,” “the dogs of perspective gather round me.” She seems unable to resist any opportunity for goggle-eyed pretension or gasps of wonder (“Clasp me, trellis of glancings,/ delicatest machine—/ body of the absconding god”). Such quotes don’t begin to suggest the page-by-page exhaustion of impulse, the near incoherence that makes these poems a kind of mania, as if she were shouting them from street corners, lost in the frenzy and ecstasy of inner monologue.

And yet. And yet. The end of “Le Manteau de Pascal” is a fugue of unreal beauty:

you do understand, don’t you, by looking?
a neck like a vase awaiting its cut flower,
filled with the sensation of being suddenly

completed,
the moment the prize is lost, the erotic

tingling,
the wool-gabardine mix, its grammatical

weave,
—you do understand, don’t you, by looking?—
never never destined to lose its elasticity,
it was this night I believe but possibly

the next
I saw clearly the impossibility of staying
filled with the sensation of being suddenly

completed,
also of unknown origin, not shade-giving, not

chronological
since the normal growth of boughs is

radiating… .

Earlier in the poem a passage from Hopkins’s journals has the hard-edged observation, the sense of the spiritual within seeing, that Graham for all her mugging never approaches. A few of its phrases find their way here, in a moment where the means of her poem do not resist its ends.

Graham can still write lovely lines when she cares to (“when only a bit of wind/ litigated in the sycamores”—that series of stresses on the lilting short i), and two or three religious poems (particularly “In the Pasture” and “Easter Morning Aubade”) almost recall the stringency and oddness of her best work (just as a prurient poem on rape recalls her worst). Such gestures are overwhelmed by the uninspired rambling, less and less anchored by subject, of this humorless book. The beauty of Whitman was his I—I—I, but the tragedy of Graham is her me—me—me—me.

J. V. Cunningham was a poet’s poet, which means the appreciation of his peers partly explained the absence of his audience—a poet’s poet is sometimes a classic waiting to happen (like Elizabeth Bishop), but often just a minority taste. The Poems of J. V. Cunningham is the definitive work of this minor poet, embalming him in a lengthy introduction and seventy pages of notes.[3]

Most of Cunningham’s poems were epigrams, which seem a modest ambition now, when art is long and getting longer. A contemporary and sometime friend of Yvor Winters, during the Depression Cunningham was a student in classics at Stanford, eventually writing a doctoral dissertation on Shakespeare. He started as a poet of musty diction and metaphysical torpor: for every phrase like “The wasp in the darkened chamber,” there are dozens of lines like “You are the problem I propose,/ My dear, the text my musings glose,” or passages like

More than the ash stays you from nothingness!
Nor here nor there is a consuming pyre!
Your essence is in infinite regress
That burns with varying consistent fire,
Mythical bird that bears in burying!

Cunningham manages to kill off any taste for metaphysical poetry by such archaizing (his early poems are like those Medieval Faires where people dress up as Vikings and throw axes, then go home and open a Budweiser)—the language had nothing to do with the life lived. It must have been a surprise to learn that Donne and Jonson were never coming back.

In the midst of these ingrown, bookish poems, drab as hotel wallpaper, full of barely recognized rage and sexual tension, “Meditation on Statistical Method” is like Archimedes’ shout:

Plato, despair!
We prove by norms
How numbers bear
Empiric forms,

How random wrong
Will average right
If time be long
And error slight;

But in our hearts
Hyperbole
Curves and departs
To infinity.

Error is boundless.
Nor hope nor doubt,
Though both be groundless,
Will average out.

Here the mordant despair finds its medium: the betrayal of grinding man-in-a-gray-flannel-suit culture is so savage, it’s a shock to realize this was written during the war. The “Meditation” (almost irreligious in its approach to the ethical) has Empson’s oddly intellective passion, his taste for science as ground for the metaphysical—but neither poet could force such tastes to yield much poetry.

This was Cunningham’s anthology piece. By his early thirties the poems were over; the next forty years were given mostly to epigrams, when there was anything to give. Epigrams concentrate the mind, and a hangman’s gloom hangs over Cunningham’s—many are dingy and depressive as his poems (though as he aged the epigrams grew more fluent), but some have the nasty zing of a man with Larkin’s misanthropy and considerable neuroses of his own.

Jove courted Danaë with golden love,
But you’re not Danaë, and I’m not Jove.
***
God is love. Then by conversion
Love is God, and sex conversion.
***
Naked I came, naked I leave the scene,
And naked was my pastime in between.

The double entendre is an act properly metaphysical: it gives the physical its other name. Cunningham’s epigrams are best when sexual; his anxieties serve his self-contempts, while giving them standing in wit. Otherwise this version of a poem from the Palatine Anthology would make self-loathing loathsome, instead of unsteadily comic:

And now you’re ready who while she was

here
Hung like a flag in a calm. Friend, though

you stand
Erect and eager, in your eye a tear,
I will not pity you, or lend a hand.

Timothy Steele’s strangely defensive introduction makes quite a sales pitch for the poet, and there’s hardly a banality he avoids: “Cunningham is a moving writer,” “he well communicates a vivid and respectful appreciation of the precariousness of life,” “May living eyes find in this collection delight and profit.” No copywriter could have done worse; most would have done better. Steele’s notes show scholarly thoroughness and pedantic fussiness (he’s the author of an interesting book on meter): though most readers under forty will want an introduction to Cunningham’s work, Steele assumes they need a history of the epigram and a primer of English meter as well. The notes, occasionally quite helpful, tell us what “Tudor” means and who Freud was (“founded psychoanalysis”). Cunningham would have laughed dryly at what idiots his readers have become.

It’s hard to know what mischievous god (Bacchus, perhaps) lured Ted Hughes into his Tales from Ovid.[4] In recent decades, the drive to write has found only mediocre expression in Hughes’s poetry, though he is still a small industry of poem, criticism, and anthology. The poet laureate has not found much inspiration in being poet laureate, though that’s hardly the fault of the Windsors, who require a satirist with the tragic taste of Swift.

Much of our literature’s familiarity with classic myth descends through Ovid, and each generation remakes the myths in its image: these prosy, muscular improvisations attempt to turn Ovid into a version of Ted Hughes, a poet of passion (“Not just ordinary passion either, but human passion in extremis—passion where it combusts, or levitates, or mutates”). But Ovid was a witty bon vivant, pampered and feted when young, risqué enough to have his Ars Amatoria banned. His subject may have been the depravity and passion of gods, but he wrote for aesthetes—a lot of lark’s tongues must have been devoured during readings of his poetry. We know little about how seriously the Romans took their gods, but the squalid fates of the Metamorphoses may have provoked as much laughter as tears—the metamorphoses are often all-too-appropriate punishments for hubris.

Hughes’s versions of two dozen tales are in gruff free verse, the no-nonsense style in miner’s boots. When he writes that Venus “swirled in the uplift of incense/ Like a great fish suddenly bulging/ Into a tide-freshened pool,” or that Chaos was “A huge agglomeration of upset./ A bolus of everything—but/ As if aborted,” you think, oh, wicked old Ted Hughes! Though he carts in new metaphors by the barrow load, though most of the tales are fairly close to the original, they lack the deceits and arch torsions of Ovid’s verse. If you can’t read Latin, the pleasures of that verse are usually absent—against Pope’s and Chapman’s Homer and Dryden’s Virgil, in English poor Ovid has only Arthur Golding’s overrated and nearly unreadable fourteeners. Hughes has made his Ovid mildly up to date, with mention of jujus, gangsters, straitjackets, photons, and spaghetti; but mostly the transformations sound strained and unlikely. Here is Pentheus on Tiresias:

“Dreams,” he explained,
“Which this methane-mouth
Tells us are the dark manifesto
Of the corrector,
In fact are corpse-lights, the ignes fatui,
Miasma from the long-drop
And fermenting pit
Of what we don’t want, don’t need,
And have dumped.
They rise from the lower bowel. And lower.”

Sometimes the metaphors just get in each other’s way.

You have become sots.
You have dunked it all, like a doughnut,
Into a mugful of junk music—
Which is actually the belly-laugh
Of this androgynous, half-titted witch.

Hughes can’t ruin completely some of Ovid’s tours de force—the terror as transformation overtakes Actaeon or the sisters of Phaëthon, the shame of the raped Callisto or Philomela. But his handling of minor details is often confused; and though in his introduction he makes no mention of practice or method, the tales seem less versions of Ovid than versions of versions of Ovid. English has startling translations by poets who couldn’t read the originals (Pound’s Cathay, some of Lowell’s Imitations, Logue’s uneven Iliad). The difficulty in working from another translation (Mary Innes’s stilted Fifties prose may have been close at hand) is not imitation but the phrase-by-phrase aversion from someone else’s words.

Ovid fawned over the Caesars (he too was a poet laureate of sorts), not that the fawning did him any more good than pandering to aesthetes with tales of dark love and deadly sex. Men find themselves superior to myth, until they suffer the fate of myth: Ovid died after nine years in exile, still seeking pardon of the emperor for an “indiscretion.” To become something original, to be touched by a god—this must have been the sentimental wish of Ovid’s audience. You need look no further than the fantasies of the emperors, their cults and faked apotheoses, to know the secret desires of the ruling class. They were so rich they longed to be poor, like Marie Antoinette, who longed to play milkmaid as long as she could return to playing Marie Antoinette again.

Once or twice in this grim, lifeless book a passage suggests how delightful a Hughes his Ovid might have been.

He brushed his hand over a clump of grass,
The blades stayed bent—soft ribbons
Of gold foil. A ripe ear of corn
Was crisp and dry and light as he plucked it
But a heavy slug of gold, intricately braided
As he rolled it between his palms.
It was then that a cold thought seemed

to whisper.

The foreshadowing and the metaphors are pure Hughes—here Hughes is having fun, and you wish he were having fun more often. In Tales from Ovid his touch turns everything to lead.

Amy Clampitt died three years ago at seventy-three, barely a decade after publication of her first book. Her poems broke into print in mature form, like Athena from the head of Zeus, and many readers took her for a poet decades younger (for years she was sly about her birthdate). It isn’t that poetry is a child’s game (Chatterton dead at seventeen, Keats at twenty-five, Shelley at twenty-nine) or that many poets write their best work before they turn thirty. Aging poets often suffer arteriosclerosis as awards shower upon them, and even latecomers like Stevens or Frost, whose first books came at or after the cusp of forty, are not immune to an ague of spirit, becoming the great man before they are great men. Clampitt was a brazen innocent (has any poet starting later started better?), and the poetry never lost that sense of discovery in the landscape as well as the language.

The five books gathered in The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt have been reprinted without editorial interference, a fond and rambling foreword by Mary Jo Salter catching much of Clampitt’s wayward spirit—the gawky, birdlike presence; the high-pitched antic voice; the allergy to cars and planes and later even trains (the bus or ship was her preferred mode of travel, and she might have been happier in buggy or dog cart).[5] Her poems spilled down the page with cheerful abandon; and the early poems (in a way her most distinctive) were often single sentences, the syntax artfully deployed in a series of delays and distractions as the thought juddered this way and that. Her long sentences were sometimes a splendor of false climaxes.

The poplars gray as a ghost by the creek,
fiddlehead coils still in fuzz, the spruces
tipped fingerling green, tamaracks gauzing
the bog, the aspens translucent, a tremor
lit from within—oh, and the air

here, the sea air an easterly rinsing
of appletrees so decrepit, so crabbed
at the knuckle, it’s a wonder they manage
to keep it up, year after year, though
the fragrance is ageless:

carmine love-knots unclenching to a rose-
pink pucker that whitens as it breaks open,
admitting the offices of pollen-combing,

nectar-
siphoning bees: all these, at the beginning
of June, one could count on… .

We are still half a dozen lines from the end —she was our Faulkner of gymnastic syntax. Repetition was a form of resistance, of hesitation alive in the form; though her lists often got the better of her, their delight was reminiscent of Auden in the pure fecundity of imagination.

Inquire what consciousness is made of
with Galen, with Leonardo, Leeuwenhoek
or Dr. Tulp, and you find two hemispheres,
a walnut in a bath of humors,

a skullcapped wreath of arteries, a weft
of fibrous thoroughfares along the walls
of Plato’s cave, the cave walls of Lascaux:
those shambling herds, this hollow

populous with fissures, declivities,
arboreal thicketings, with pairings
and degrees, this fist-sized flutter,
mirror-lake of matter,

seat of dolor and jubilee, the law of Moses
and the giggling underneath the bedclothes,
of Bedlam and the Coronation Anthem—all
these shut up in a nutshell.

Thus, the brain. She could make something from nothing, even of the nothings something was not (“no loom, no spinneret, no forge, no factor,/ no process whatsoever, patent/ applied or not applied for”). Her poems sidled toward their point, the eye ever caught by some bright flash elsewhere; and sometimes there didn’t seem to be much point beyond the piling up of phrases, the hectic disposition of fresh vocabulary, the sentences falling forward toward an ending cut short, like an amateur singer yanked offstage.

Some poems were too tenuously balanced on a single idea, overloaded with sequins of detail glinting with nothing but the desire to accumulate—Clampitt suffered the Midas touch, without always knowing what to touch. Then the seeing was no longer believing—the richness could become wreckage, the prodigality a selfishness (Clampitt hated to leave anything out, but if a poem includes everything it is just the world). Part of her charm was in the danger of being dazzled by local effects—the baroque vocabulary out of a shotgunned page of Roget’s, the facts winkled from some encyclopedia: there’s nothing like failure thinly skirted to increase the tension of pleasure. That desperate richness was practiced as if the phrase behind had only just thought of the phrase ahead. It seemed to surprise the author no less than the reader when a poem circled back to its beginning like a benzene ring.

But if Clampitt was content to write the same poems again and again (she was a catalogue of seed plants, a royal aviary), how different she made the best of them (the worst were a fabric so similar, poem to poem, a reader had to look at the title to recall if the subject was bird or breviary). Among her contemporaries she was closest to James Merrill—the flamboyant surfaces, the preposterously embroidered lexicon (the inheritance of Auden), the sinuous thought and conversational asides (not as witty, but not as frivolous, either). A longer view might mark a different angle of descent, of association by language and line, from Marianne Moore (1887) to Elizabeth Bishop (1911) to Amy Clampitt (1920): their interest in objects, in the humor of the observing eye, created some of the unconscious principles of sensory record in our century. A poet like Clampitt can no longer be dismissed as the best woman poet of her day (in the current generation the women are more interesting than the men); but when we lose our fear of differences between the sexes, something that defines the feminine may reside in these poems. It’s not that men can’t see this way; it’s that behind such observation, so often, stands a woman.

Clampitt’s later books were variations on her first, though her range grew more ambitious (and she grew to like shorter sentences): she wrote memorably about a tourist’s culture (especially England and Venice —her poems on classical themes seem just shards from Bulfinch’s), about writers and social figures she admired (particularly in the brilliant but overlong sequence on Keats—her brief lives were often merely dutiful), about the ignored byways of the natural world. Only the poems about politics or pop culture, from Maytag washers to John Lennon, show an unsure hand. Her later poems became more detached and explanatory—in a way she stopped living her perceptions. Hers was a poetry other in its interests; the few hints of unhappy love dropped in The Kingfisher, her first book, are never afterwards alluded to, and the recitals of daily events are without inner life. There was not progress so much as profusion. But what lovely and eccentric profusion! We were fortunate to have a poet so excited by the ordinary, who could make out of nothing, or almost nothing, these radiant, unlikely, lasting things.

Notes
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1. Canaan, by Geoffrey Hill; Houghton Mifflin, 76 pages, $22. Go back to the text.
2. The Errancy, by Jorie Graham; Ecco, 112 pages, $22. Go back to the text.
3. The Poems of J. V. Cunningham, edited and with an introduction and commentary by Timothy Steele; Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 215 pages, $28.95; $16.95 (paper). Go back to the text.
4. Tales from Ovid, by Ted Hughes; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 257 pages, $35. Go back to the text.
5. The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt, with a foreword by Mary Jo Salter; Knopf, 459 pages, $30. Go back to the text.