Louise Glück has become our Persephone of quiet hurt and bruised longing. When she says, with professional sorrow, “I even loved a few times in my disgusting human way,” you know she’d rather be one of Ovid’s heifers or laurel trees, punished for being loved by a god. In Vita Nova (1996) and Meadowlands (1999), she used the classical world to underwrite the collapse of a marriage (a disturbing number of Homeric characters were eager to impersonate her). Glück has seen the myths behind modern love, seen them for the lies they are—and she’s glad they are lies.

A poet who writes a book called The Seven Ages [1] has been thinking about her past, not about As You Like It. Glück’s childhood at times shimmers like a folk tale (one that starts in the Black Forest and ends in the suburbs), a tale at the source of adult unhappiness. Freud long ago taught us to stare at the child for the angst of the adult, and his fairy tale is as persuasive as any recorded by Grimm (if Freud was wrong, many adults will have a lot of explaining to do). Looking back, Glück sees two bored little girls, herself and her sister, in the endless summer of childhood. They were living on an island, she says, and they sound marooned until you remember it’s Long Island.

 

Long Island. Terrible
storms off the Atlantic, summer rain
hitting the gray shingles. I watched
the copper beech, the dark leaves turning
a sort of lacquered ebony. It seemed to be
secure, as secure as the house.

A sort of. Seemed to be. Glück is wary of a noun’s finality, cautious of an adjective’s definition. She and her sister may be the only philosophers to work out a theory of perception based on the difference between fingernail polish wet in the bottle and dry on the nail. It’s one of the cheeri- est moments in this icy and eviscerated book.

Glück’s poems might have been spoken by one of the shades of Erebos, come to taste the blood offered by Odysseus. Her tone is full of the dead’s bewildered sense of injustice, their wounded and angry conviction. Her solemn memories of childhood have as much foreboding as the mild suburbs can manage. It’s hard for her to convince the reader she wasn’t a pampered child with a taste for despair—she loves the adolescent hunger before knowledge, the ignorance we name innocence.

Glück knows you have to be a masochist to read her (and many readers are—why else be readers?). “Why should my poems not imitate my life?,” she asks, and she means they must be cold, attenuated, stunned as if struck by a hammer. “Why do I suffer?,” she asks. “Why am I ignorant?” Such raw questions, written after the end of love, the end of eros, don’t want answers—they revel in their long-suffering suffering.

Glück’s hatred of the lushness of metaphor, the sweetness of words, has thinned her poems to bare skeletons of prose. She reaches toward immensities as if choosing a laundry detergent.

All the defenses, the spiritual rigidity, the insistent
unmasking of the ordinary to reveal the tragic,
were actually innocence of the world.
Meaning the partial, the shifting, the mutable—
all that the absolute excludes. I sat in the dark, in the living room.

At times she forgets she’s writing poems, the language is so brute with abstraction (she lives so much in the abstract, it’s as if her lovers were undistributed middles). She has whipped her poems into tedious resentment, into unremitting, sometimes luxuriating angst. Glück believes love is inadequate and, if not, that we will make it so; for a few startled moments, in her ecstasy of grief, you see a woman standing naked in her own elegy. She remains a guarded and feverish poet (even the punctuation seems unhappy to be here), a poet of unearthly gifts all too eager to lose them. There’s no poet quite so in love with her own pain, no contemporary purer in her extremity— she has the gorgeous gloominess of Sylvia Plath, her angers scrunched up like damp handkerchiefs. How cheerfully Glück will go, when her poems have jettisoned everything they can, into poor Jaques’s final scene: Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Anne Carson is not just odd, she’s Canadian. A classics scholar, she delights in confusing the contemporary with the classical— the book that brought her general attention, Autobiography of Red (1998), retold the story of the monster Geryon as if he were a modern winged boy. She’s used to the palimpsests of the ancient world, the vellums that leak the secrets of old erasures; her poems often force one text to shine through another. The Beauty of the Husband superimposes passages (often deletions or second thoughts) by John Keats, our great poet of eros and thwarted appetites, over the story of a collapsing marriage. [2] The book is subtitled “a fictional essay in 29 tangos.” What are tangos?, you might ask. “A tango (like a marriage) is something you have to dance to the end,” the dust jacket helpfully explains.

Carson is not afraid to put the unpoetic at risk in poetry. Her poems are full of explanations that aren’t quite explanations, of sidelong glances and cul-de-sacs. She loves leading the reader down the garden path, except at the end there isn’t any garden. Each of the “tangos” has a title bold as a billboard; for example,

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO KEATS (IS IT YOU WHO TOLD ME KEATS WAS A DOCTOR?) ON GROUNDS THAT A DEDICATION HAS TO BE FLAWED IF A BOOK IS TO REMAIN FREE AND FOR HIS GENERAL SURRENDER TO BEAUTY

We never learn how the dedication is flawed, but Carson (a poet as deliciously eccentric as Amy Clampitt) is devoted to homo ludens, man the game-player and dreamer. Her poems are often whimsical if slightly aggressive games though you’re never sure you’ve been told the rules. She writes in deadpan prose, the sort Buster Keaton might have perfected; most of the humor in this long book of marital disaster comes from the delivery:

And upstairs that night, which proved a long night, as he was dragging
his wounded honor about the hotel room like a damaged queen of moths
because she mentioned Houyhnhnms and he objected
to being “written off as an object of satire,” they moved
several times through a cycle of remarks like—
What is this, what future is there
I thought
You said
We never
What exactly day year name anything who I was who I am who did you
Did you or did you not

This dreadful couple, with their tennis match of accusations, are wrong from the start. He’s a pathological liar with a taste for adultery. She seems erotic as a potato and charitable as a vulture. We never understand the marriage (the wife claims the secret was “Beauty. No great secret. Not ashamed to say I loved him for his beauty”), but that makes it only as mysterious as most marriages.

Carson’s scatty, off-center patter keeps this dysfunctional pair more fascinating than they should be (old tales must never be old in the telling). She might say digression is the most powerful tool in argument— that we come at the truth crabwise, if we come at all. If the husband writes his mistress, he borrows a phrase Andromache used as she parted from Hector. The wife —of course she finds the letter, of course the phrase has been pilfered from her (she may be a classics scholar)—natters on about loyalty, beauty, sex, then animal mimicry (a harmless species patterned like a poisonous one), and finally the war games that obsess her husband. Her scatty associations take only half a page, but at the end you know this couple as well as you know your shrieking neighbors. “Jealousy,” says the wife, “formed no small part of my relationship to the Battle of Borodino.”

The Beauty of the Husband is a sublimely funny improvisation, a cracked and updated version of George Meredith’s Modern Love, that much neglected work. Carson has been mistaken for a postmodernist, but she’s far too tame and too morbid for that—she rides the hint of autobiography without ever confessing a thing. She’s conservative in her ends if wicked in her means (the avant-garde is often the testing ground for techniques better used elsewhere). Like all originals, she forces herself on your attention in a slightly irritating way—Linnaeus might have been stumped by her mixture of rhetoric both antique and postmodern (rhetorically, she’s a platypus). She can be silly, meager in conception, slapdash in execution, yet we haven’t had for a long while a poet who could rescue the classical world from becoming a suburb of academia—to find the last, you’d have to go back to Lowell. She has discovered, in the nerves of human relation, a subject adequate to her singular and strange resources.

The literature of alcohol wasn’t written for alcoholics, but at times it’s hard for anyone but an alcoholic to read it. How boring other people’s addictions are! (How fascinating your own.) I’ve tried many times to finish Under the Volcano, tried to fall under the spell of Tender Is the Night, but, when the frail boat of prose launches onto the vast sea of alcohol, I’d rather order a dry martini. A few great poems may have been written under the stimulus of alcohol or opium (though far more have probably died stillborn), yet great poems are rarely about taking drugs—Keats only pretends to in “Ode to a Nightingale.” Franz Wright, the son of the poet James Wright (himself an alcoholic), wrote into middle-age mostly about his addictions—“Here’s one for you, Why does F drink/ (Gives him something to do/ after he shoots up).” I began to think his minimalist, sometimes unpleasant poems, beery as Bukowski, gabby as Frank O’Hara, would collapse into alcoholic stupor. The Beforelife is a book of recovery, but if addiction is boring, recovery can be even worse. [3]

We live in a country that after the pur- suit of happiness believes in the right to rehab. Wright’s earlier poems were all too proud of his outlaw habits; he knows how hard it is to kick an addiction, how suspicious people will be of him (“My name is Franz, and I’m a recovering asshole”). Occasionally he jots down some trivial observations or composes a clumsy parable, but his real subject, his only subject, is his affair with himself—and whether his narcissism is whetted by alcohol or worshiped by psychiatrists doesn’t make much difference. This would matter less if Wright weren’t an artist of concision—his poems are rare- ly sloppy and have meticulous control of their small means (he’s a demonic version of William Carlos Williams). He treats the self-indulgence of the addict with acid humor:

And you will find me
any night
now, try
at the motherless sky.
com

How dare you
interrupt
me.com
I’m sorry
I was ever born.com

Like many recovering addicts (recovery is a metaphor drawn from the notion that addiction is a disease—perhaps one day there will be clinics for recovering bank robbers), Wright is less ashamed than angry; his new poems are just as sentimental as his old, only now there’s a good deal more sanctimoniousness. When he recalls an aborted child (“Child I helped/ to do away with// you would be/ almost an adult now// I hope my friend”) or pleads for love (“Please love me/ And I will play for you/ this poem/ upon the guitar/ I myself made/ out of cardboard and black threads/ when I was ten years old./ Love me or else”), you learn a lot about the most addictive drug of all, the alcohol of self-pity. If Coleridge could write “Kubla Khan” with a tincture of opium, Wright should have gotten more from his multiple addictions than these plodding lines of prose. He hasn’t beaten his habits; he’s just exchanged one addiction for another.

Anthony Hecht is the most morally intoxicated, the richest yet most severe, of the quarrelsome and diverse generation of American poets born in the 1920s. By the time this group reached college during and after the war, the modernists slept safely in anthologies. Hecht’s peers worked largely in a tradition largely mapped. They have been a group, not of innovators, but of craftsmen of the known—even the avant-garde poets among them barked more than they bit. After a bejeweled and cautious beginning, Hecht’s poems grew bleak and furious, battering their subjects with the siege equipment of meter and rhyme.

The moody, valedictory poems of The Darkness and the Light are more ravaged and humane than any Hecht has written. [4] If his poems were flawed, it was because they were unyielding to the emotions they evoked: they preached vulnerability while remaining invulnerable. Their very precisions left no room for the ambivalence necessary to strong feeling; the purifying light of Hecht’s heaven burned hotter than the fire of hell. His writing could be marmoreal but glorious, and at times it still is:

Etched on the window were barbarous
thistles of frost,
Edged everywhere in that tame winter
sunlight
With pavé diamonds and fine prickles of ice
Through which a shaft of the late afternoon
Entered our room to entertain the sway
And float of motes, like tiny aqueous lives,
Then glanced off the silver teapot, raising
stains
Of snailing gold upcast across the ceiling.

Such stunning passages are infrequent now. There’s rarely the sense that the words could have been chosen no better, could have been chosen by no one else. (Shakespeare’s great lines were written as if he’d paid Prospero to conjure the words from thin air; Hecht’s lines are calculated like a great general’s routes of supply or order of battle. You admire the tact of the tactics, but you see how it’s done.)

The loosening of control has made Hecht a warmer, more sympathetic poet, but he has lost the fine clinch of his endings, the darkening necessities of his arguments. The poems eke out their occasions: a long series of biblical tales (Lot, Judith, Saul and David, Haman, Samson, and many more— the book is like a biblical epic with Charlton Heston in all the parts) becomes dutiful rewriting by a poet who has rarely been routine. Here is the last stanza on Paul’s conversion:

The Damascene culprits now could rest untroubled,
Their delinquencies no longer the concern
Of this fallen, converted Pharisee. He rather
From sighted blindness to blind sight went hobbled
And was led forth to a house where he would turn
His wrath from one recusancy to another.

From one recusancy to another! It sounds like a report by his parole officer.

We accuse a language richer than its meanings of aestheticism, of attending more to the means than the matter (more to the mutter than the moans). Hecht’s wordplay could make any reader hold his head in his hands (few poets have so fatal a taste for puns like “the ring-a-ding-Ding-an-Sich”). He’ll set up a whole sonnet for a ridiculous last line, “In a hollow, deep, engastrimythic voice.” (The reader doesn’t think, “How remarkable!” He thinks, “Didn’t Eliot do much better with ‘Polyphiloprogenitive’?”). Hecht’s rhymes ring the changes with delicious invention; but when the mood comes over him he’ll rhyme distress, he with Jesse (about as awful as it gets, unless rhyming cornea with California is even worse).

A poet’s talents exist in productive tension for only a decade or so. Before, the language is all main force, the subjects mistaken, the voice immature; after, the poet often hardens into manner, his subjects written to extinction. Very few contemporary poets have written one remarkable book; and almost none has written two as fine as The Hard Hours (1967) and Millions of Strange Shadows (1977). If we expect less from a poet soon to enter his eighties, we nevertheless recall the rude brilliance of Yeats’s last poems, the Stevens of “The Rock,” Clampitt in her indomitable seventies. One of the bleakest poems in The Darkness and the Light tells a story of the German retreat from Normandy: there’s an innocent or not-so-innocent family, a desperate soldier who needs a bicycle, the threat of a gun. It’s a well-crafted set piece, but years ago Hecht would have gone further, would have written “‘More Light! More Light!,’” or “The Cost,” or “The Deodand,” poems as indispensable to our imaginings of war as the etchings of Goya. As he ages, a poet’s main competitor is himself —his younger, ravenous, unforgiving self.

Stephen Dunn is a rational man, probably a good husband and father, a generous and genial neighbor, homo suburbanus at his best. He’s a poet of daily life, of the dailiness of daily life; you half expect the poems in Different Hours to come with classified ads at the end. [5] Dunn’s poems are moral in a quiet way, and pedestrian in a loud and guffawing way—he’s like a used-car salesman with a conscience.

Dunn knows what he risks as bard of the suburbs—when he writes in praise of dullness, of “year after year/ doing a few same things/ in the same house with the same person,” you know dullness is a religion, with its own sacraments and sins. It’s a religion for the long haul. Dunn is a craftsman, a journeyman who at sixty-one has published eleven collections; they’re honest, hardworking, never particularly profound but never particularly shallow (reading him is like watching someone always waist-deep in the community pool). He writes as if he were figuring out a set of floor plans, and his subjects are the stuff of scrapbooks (scrapbooks with a little mild philosophizing): a straying wife, a divorce, aging, the army, aging again, the town idiot, a mad dog, a bus station, a lost wallet, worms. If sometimes he writes about the death of God or Odysseus’ secret, he treats it just as he treats the mad dog or the lost wallet. He’s democratic in his subjects, and democratic in his tastes, because Dunn is a reasonable man.

A lot of American poets are reasonable men. A reasonable man has reasonable thoughts about reasonable things. There’s nothing at all remarkable about the man, or the thought, or the thing; but the man thought a thought about the thing, and, by gum, he decided a reasonable reader would like to read it. There’s scarcely a word put down in surprise or delight, scarcely a syntax troubled or a metaphor sprung. (As a genius the reasonable man turns out to be Auden and as a misanthrope Larkin—but unless you’re a genius or a misanthrope, why bother?)

Because in large cities the famous truths
already had been plumbed and debated,
the metaphysicians of South Jersey lowered
their gaze, just tried to be themselves.
They’d gather at coffee shops in Vineland
and deserted shacks deep in the Pine Barrens.
Nothing they came up with mattered
so they were free to be eclectic, and as odd
as getting to the heart of things demanded.

If such metaphysicians wrote poetry, they’d write the poetry of half measures Dunn prefers, where every phrase carries its cautionary whiff of failure: “of making do with what’s been left us,” “In the world I can’t help/ but live in,” “my normal/ dreamy life of uncommitted crimes,” “Use what’s lying around the house./ Make it simple and sad.” It’s all a little proud of its ordinariness. If you asked him whether a glass of milk was half empty or half full, he’d grumble, a little plaintively, “Why are you asking me?”

Arnold called Pope a classic of our prose, but who now would think Pope prosy? Poets today are masters of prose, but they’re not classics—they’re the cattle of prose. Indeed, we are a country of prose—we eat prose with our cereal by morn and hear it yakking on television by night. If there’s no space for poetry in our busy lives, well, it all happened a long time ago and it hurts the head to think the old poetic way. We’re proud of our prosaic mountains and our amber waves of prosaic grain, and if we could sing (if we could sing in prose) that’s what we’d sing about. There’s nothing exactly wrong with a poet like Dunn, and nothing exactly right, either. You wish he had something to say that wasn’t so fresh-paint predictable, so plain-spoken and Rotarian, so gosh-darn dull. You wish he wouldn’t be so, well, so reasonable.

Carl Phillips loves to throw little hitches into his sentences, so at the end you can hardly remember how they began—if there’s a hell for grammarians, it’s parsing a sentence like “It is for, you see, eventually the deer to/ take it, the fruit// hangs there.” Every derangement of style must have an advantage equal to its irritations—ruptures in syntax must have more advantage to meaning than disadvantage to the understanding, because punctuation and word order are meant to be gestures nearly invisible. Phillips is trying to draw into print some of the errant energies of speech, the messy character of the said. Berryman was the last poet to wrestle with the angel of syntax and come away bloodied if unbowed, but Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and The Dream Songs now look like period pieces. Phillips has much less to say in The Tether [6] and toying with syntax therefore seems merely self-indulgent (just as his poems seem mostly about the progress of their own perceptions).

to say

I missed things is
it precisely, the all but
unbearably lit
cropscapes—blue-&-soy,
splay, I-mean-to; visible from

miles, the weathered
verticals, like
anomaly on stilts and

corsaged, to say the thin
blades milling, making
more fine a wind
who has seen?

It’s beautiful, but wistful and vacant: the substance wouldn’t feed a pair of starlings. At best the style forces you to read carefully, a benefit when so many poems seem predigested, masticated by contented cows; at worst, it calls attention to its own pretty emptiness. When Phillips starts throwing parenthetical phrases at you like brickbats— “(come)// (what it most sounded like)// (plunder)”—or merrily ending sentences and poems with dashes (his punctuation resembles street signs: YIELD, DETOUR, BRIDGE OUT AHEAD), you realize he’s been reading far too much Jorie Graham.

One poem without such borrowed ornament suggests what this poet might do if less concerned with advertising what he does. The subject is a shard of Roman glass:

That piece in your hands now
—I found it just south of Rome, not far from
the waters that, despite pollution, when
they receive the light reflected off the salmon-,
sky-, oxblood-colored villas that front

the boat-littered bay of Naples, suggest
something, still, of a grand history that is
finally holy, there being always a holiness
attached to that which is absolute—even
should the subject prove, the entire time, to
have been loss.

A poet with such a moral imagination may yet discover a style sufficient to his losses.

Seamus Heaney’s new book is comfortable as a pair of old boots. [7] Electric Light contains many of the things he does very well, and some of the things he does rather ill (poems about poetry, for instance)—Hea- ney is such a domesticated poet, one who profits as much as Robert Frost by being domesticated, we may be tempted to undervalue him. Like Frost he’s in danger, at the outset of old age (Heaney’s sixty-two, and when Frost turned sixty-two he had few good poems left), of succumbing to his manner, of being the stage-Irishman Irishman the poems at times require, a forelock-tugging craftsman, a man with his feet still firmly in the bog and a square of turf for a hat.

Heaney’s new poems are backward-looking, rank with the nostalgia of the Fifties and Forties. A poet’s childhood, at least according to the poet, is full of incidents almost clairvoyant, when the child seems instinct with the poetic tongue. Awareness of language has to start somewhere, and for a poet such somewheres elicit a peculiarly evocative commemoration, where everything the past pointed forward to now points backward in fulfillment. Heaney is a chronicler of childhood (what would his children’s poems be like?). In the best poem of this new book, children try to figure out the connection between the baby doctor and the baby. “All of us came in Doctor Kerlin’s bag,” or so the children assume—they imagine the ceiling of his surgery strung with baby parts, from which (what else?) he makes the babies. This is hilariously piquant, a snapshot of those most reasonable of scientists, children, working out the order of the world from the most stringent of hypotheses and a little misinformation.

Heaney handles his material with the ease of long use (though this can sometimes seem lackadaisical). He slips along the damp edge of sentiment, but rarely crosses the border into tears.

Candle-grease congealed, dark-streaked with
wick soot…
The smashed thumb-nail
Of that ancient mangled thumb was puckered
pearl,

Rucked quartz, a littered Cumae.
In the first house where I saw electric light,
She sat with her fur-lined felt slippers
unzipped,

Year in, year out, in the same chair, and
whispered
In a voice that at its loudest did nothing else
But whisper. We were both desperate

The night I was left to stay, when I wept
and wept
Under the clothes, under the waste of light
Left turned on in the bedroom. “What ails
you, child,

What ails you, for God’s sake?”

This is told without fuss, the way it needs to be told—Heaney knows, seems to sense intuitively, the way to tell a poem. We forget that our sympathies must be invented, not merely elicited.

Heaney loves to write about being a poet, a subject almost poisonous to poetry. There are elegies for Ted Hughes, Zbigniew Herbert, Joseph Brodsky, and many another. There’s an embarrassing duet with Virgil (even the idea is self-flattering), as well as a low-temperature translation of the ninth eclogue, where an old songster passes his songs, a little grumpily, to a younger (more self-flattery). After the poems on reading, on a bookcase, on the day-to-day life of the poet, which seems to involve lots of travel to poetic places for poetic reasons, you’re glad for the homeliest act of observation, for the small catechism of tailoring a suit. If some of these late poems are amateurish, it’s good to see the amateur Heaney again, rather than the tweedy professional.

Heaney lives in the split allegiance of his vowels. His side-slanting dialect, with its coolth and delph and oxter-rigged, its stour and glarry and tetter-barked, gives English back its Anglo-Saxon burr (it’s not without irony that he draws a line from Grendel’s attack on Heorot to the IRA). Heaney is still our great poet of the dumb constancy of nature.

Perch on their water-perch hung in the clear
Bann River
Near the clay bank in alder-dapple and waver,

Perch we called “grunts,” little flood-slubs,
runty and ready,
I saw and I see in the river’s glorified body

That is passable through; but they’re bluntly
holding the pass,
Under the water-roof, over the bottom,
adoze,

Guzzling the current, against it, all muscle
and slur
In the finland of perch, the fenland of alder,
on air

That is water, on carpets of Bann stream, on
hold
In the everything flows and steady go of the
world.

We have seen some of these poems before, and will no doubt see some again (repetition is the act of homage a poet pays himself). In Heaney the sense of déjà vu is very close to the condition of fate. If he can be a bit much, far too many poets are a bit little. Electric Light is an interim book, but Heaney’s books have always seemed betwixt and between—he’s the most shapeshifting of our contemporaries, wily as a snake (of which there are still none in Ireland). Heaney is only the latest, and not the last, of a line of Irishmen who have blessed the language that estranges them from the Celtic past, of Wilde and Shaw and Yeats and Joyce and Beckett, a line as long as Banquo’s heirs.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. The Seven Ages, by Louise Glück; Ecco Press, 68 pages, $23. Go back to the text.
2. The Beauty of the Husband, by Anne Carson; Alfred A. Knopf, 151 pages, $22. Go back to the text.
3. The Beforelife, by Franz Wright; Alfred A. Knopf, 79 pages, $22. Go back to the text.
4. The Darkness and the Light, by Anthony Hecht; Alfred A. Knopf, 68 pages, $23. Go back to the text.
5. Different Hours, by Stephen Dunn; W. W. Norton, 121 pages, $22. Go back to the text.
6. The Tether, by Carl Phillips; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 83 pages, $22. Go back to the text.
7. Electric Light, by Seamus Heaney; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 100 pages, $22. Go back to the text.

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