Charles Wright’s poetry is the last refuge of nineteenth-century oratory—his overwrought syntax is its own religion. In early books he tried on various styles like a man changing hats. He never made any of the hats his own, and the hats never made him their own, either—they were just hats. For the past decade, as middle age has become mortal, his poems have settled into loose, baggy journals heavily influenced by Ezra Pound. The sea-chop of rhythm, the epigrammatic line, the snatch of foreign language—all are the lost property of a great flawed poet.

Through language, strict attention—
Verona mi fe’, disfecemi Verona, the song goes.
I’ve hummed it, I’ve bridged the break

To no avail.
April. The year begins beyond

words,
Beyond myself and the image of myself,

beyond
Moon’s ice and summer’s thunder. All that.

The style seems less an homage than a way of avoiding argument.

Black Zodiac[1] opens with an “Apologia pro vita sua”—it’s not often a poet is drawn to Cardinal Newman these days. If there’s a religious crisis here, it is beyond the reach of style. The poems are usually arranged in short, unattached sections with only the most distracted relation to one another; they stop and start, and get mired in metaphysics. When a poet sinks into his attitudes, mortal thoughts are near; and if he writes, “Time is the source of all good,/ time the engenderer/ Of entropy and decay,/ Time the destroyer, our only-begetter and advocate,” you know Eliot and Anglo-Catholicism hover in the background.

Wright threatens to open a minimart of metaphysics. His poems are full of vague notions and vaguer discontents. It’s not that I’m deaf to metaphysics; it’s that these conundrums were old a century ago—the poets they were alive for are the dust of our anthologies. None of them would have let his metaphysics be muddled with Wright’s country sentiment and aw-shucks naïveté: “If God hurt the way we hurt,/ he, too, would be heart-sore,”; “Can we address a blade of grass, the immensity of a snowflake?”; “The meat of the sacrament is invisible meat and a ghostly substance./ I’ll say.” If this is innocence, give me experience any day.

It’s not clear whether the religious vocabulary reaches for redemption or recognizes that in our secular age even the language of religion has been soiled. The religious overlay isn’t particularly convincing —when Wright composes his “Lives of the Saints,” the saints seem to be poets, a romantic and self-pitying idea if ever there was one. He has written with bitter fondness of childhood in hardscrabble country (poets of small towns always recall life as a little hardscrabble), but the religion here doesn’t rise from clapboard churches and the mysticism of Southern childhood. It has the scent of Gothic cathedrals and poetry anthologies.

Wright is one of the best poets of his generation, the generation born after Black Friday and before the end of World War II. Few poets this good write so pointlessly, but line by line he is a master of gorgeous effects. In a haze of vacant meditation, he has not lost his eye for the natural world:

Nothing is flat-lit and tabula rasaed in

Charlottesville,
Umbrian sackcloth,
stigmata and Stabat mater,
A sleep and a death away,
Night, and a sleep and a death away—
Light’s frost-fired and Byzantine here,
aureate, beehived,
Falling in Heraclitean streams
Through my neighbor’s maple trees.

Umbria and the stigmata and Byzantium and Heraclitus aren’t really necessary (living in Charlottesville must be a lot more interesting than I’d suspected), but Wright bothers to see the world—or to imagine it, which is almost better. If his nature is always vivid in the same way, the “Sky white as raw silk” and the “Willows, medusa-hooded and bone-browed” are the small affairs of spirit his Chinese-sage ventures never approach. A poet who can write “A little wind/ whiffles across the back yard like a squall line” and dozens of other lines as redolent and restless ought to be writing poems, not notes for notes for poems. The sketchy descriptions are lovely, but they’re lazy. You could churn out such stuff every day (in Zone Journals [1988], Wright did exactly that), and it would cost you nothing.

It’s hard to care about poems so resolute in their absences, so deft in their mean evasions. Wright seems to make evasion a moral principle, as if it were the only way to capture the transitory. (If Eliot’s Hollow Men wrote poetry, it would be poetry like this.) These poems are like paintings by Seurat. You back away from the colorful clots and a ghostly image appears, but the image is still made of dots. It’s a tale by Henry James—Wright has worked a life to perfect a way to say the important thing, only to find he has nothing to say.

Michael Lind’s The Alamo[2] isn’t as awful as you’d think—not nearly as awful as it might have been. This six-thousand-line epic in rhyme royal is one of those silly ideas that possesses young poets, or used to—there haven’t been this many bad rhymed stanzas since Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate. Lind, the defector from conservative political commentary (author of The Next American Nation and Up from Conservatism), has done his research and had the historian’s nightmare —so many anecdotes, so little space. His epic is stuffed with names if not faces, and every defender of the Alamo gets at least a line for his tombstone.

Americans revel in their old defeats: the Alamo, Pearl Harbor, and Custer’s Last Stand are commemorated in the national memory more warmly, and more brazenly, than the victories that followed. Given less of a sweet tooth for nobility and martial valor (the poem is dedicated “to the men and women of the Armed Forces of the United States of America and their families”), Lind might have done for William Travis and his men what Evan S. Connell did for Custer. A minutely detailed account of the battle could dispel the myths more brutally than these jingling stanzas.

Lind has a gift for the arresting phrase: his metaphors and epic similes have a sharpness and élan missing in contemporary poetry. When Sam Houston is compared to a snapping turtle; or Santa Anna’s cavalry murder the wounded, “Wielding their spears as bargemen would use/ their staffs to lever flatboats”; or Mexican troops attack the Alamo, “adhesive coils of a colossal squid/ smothering a whale caught in its weird/ embrace,” you’re startled by how fresh the antique device seems. The backwoods stumpery of Houston and Crockett flaunts its cracker-barrel wit, and other speeches are drily based on classical models (Travis rouses his officers in the voice of Sarpedon speaking to Glaucus). When a woman and her children defend a fort with her underwear, or the new rebels ride across the uncovered graveyard of rebels slaughtered twenty years before, the irony could scarcely be more poker-faced.

Unfortunately, Lind’s modest poetic gifts are overwhelmed by all the accidental comedy to which a minor poet is subject. His lines galumph along in pentameter, mostly without complaint (though frequently they lose a foot in battle); but his idea of story-telling comes from supermarket bodice-rippers—with a suitably lurid cover, this might have been called Tongues of Flame. His characters are miniature, glossy versions of their historical selves, a TV-movie waxworks of superficial action.

Lind’s major negative asset is a hilarious insensitivity to tone. One hopes Travis never said, “Each petty state would be its neighbor’s vampire,/ till Britain, France, or Russia played the umpire.” A Mexican officer arrives, “his posture stiff, pace brisk, and aspect worried./ At his approach, gloves blizzarded and flurried.” As a soldier dies, “he tasted sour cud,/ his knees went flaccid, and he slapped the mud.” The images are ludicrously up to date. Santa Anna “scowls, barks, paces like a coach/ upon the sidelines in a frantic game,” and later the Alamo becomes the Astrodome: “Far off, the Alamo looked like a sports/ arena, like a stadium by night,/ where scores are marked by cheering.” His vocabulary is sometimes preposterously inflated (“their contumelious suzerain,/ a skewbald stallion”) or his imagery comically askew (“Darst, bayoneted, left a family/ headless in Gonzales”). When children are bayoneted, “Red began to rim/ the tiny mouths like mustaches of jam.” Snatches of quotation cannot quite reveal the genial blundering of the whole martial melodrama:

Muskets flamed

and metal swished through flesh. Moaning
and maimed,
Bill Blazeby, Captain of the New Orleans
Greys,
rolled down the cold dirt rampart in a daze;

his forty-one-year journey from his home

in England through New York and then
the port
of New Orleans brought him here, to soak
the loam

of Bexar with puddling blood.

Metal swished through flesh! Soak the loam! We are back in Ivanhoe. The view of battle is so cloyingly naïve and piously sentimental, you expect the dying defenders to break into “The Streets of Laredo.” This version of the Alamo is fit for schoolrooms (you’d think Texas was born in a manger)—it wears its patriotism on its sleeve. Lind doesn’t do everything wrong (his view of Santa Anna is remarkably evenhanded); but how, just before battle, can a poet launch into half a dozen stanzas of science fiction to suggest the Alamo is small in the scheme of things? Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie, meet “two-legged reptile warriors,” “squeaking grubs,” and “leopard-colored slugs.”

Mary Oliver’s bland, consolatory poetry is a favorite of people who don’t like poetry (it’s a favorite of some poets as well, but then poets often don’t like poetry, either). Sometimes in West Wind[3] she’ll write of small incidents—finding a dead snake or rescuing a field mouse—but mostly she wants to Appreciate Nature. This is just the way I am, her poems seem to say; I love nature to death, why don’t you, you pitiful stay-at-home reader of poetry, you? Reading her poems is like joining a garden club where the members are part of a plant-worshipping cult—no wonder they feel holier than thou. When Oliver looks into her yard, she thinks of the Buddha arising. And herself? She’s likely to be lifted into the air by rapture (“as though I had shaken my arms and lo! they were wings”).

It’s one thing for a poet to cultivate a wide-eyed persona capable of saying, “What can we do/ but keep on breathing in and out… ?” or “How can I hope to be friends/ with the hard white stars… ?” This is just a version of Little Me poetry that went out with bobby socks and Shirley Temples. But it’s a bit much when such a poet says, “What will ambition do for me that the fox …/ has not already done?” Oliver has an agent and has not objected to the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. She’s not spending all her spare moments working on transcendence. Usually she’s writing gimcrack Whitman instead:

Am I not among the early risers
and the long-distance walkers?

Have I not stood, amazed, as I consider
the perfection of the morning star
above the peaks of the houses, and the

crowns of the trees blue in the

first light? …

Above the modest house and the palace—

the same darkness.
Above the evil man and the just,

the same stars.
Above the child who will recover and

the child who will not recover,

the same energies roll forward,
from one tragedy to the next and from one

foolishness to the next.

I bow down.

I bow down! There’s the humble self-dramatizing touch. Whitman was gimcrack, too, but we forgive him because he was a genius of gimcrack.

Oliver’s head is filled with such good-natured mush. You’d love to have her for a next-door neighbor, though you’d worry that she spends too much time in the yard, looking up at the sky. She loves nature (out by her trees she pulls up a pew), but she loves gushing about nature even more: “How the sky flares and grows brighter, all the time!/ How time extends!,” “I would touch the faces of the daisies,/ and I would bow down/ to think about it,” “Snowflakes, coasting into the winter woods, making a very small sound, like this/ soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. …” I begin to long for some sign of six millennia of culture—a fork, say, or a cell phone.

Her poetry is allergic to the interesting word. It’s almost always “cold, black fields” or “white skull” or “pure, deep darkness,” poetry stripped to its elements, but also stripped of its distinctiveness. When she writes of some black oaks, “I’m pale with longing for their thick bodies ruckled with lichen,” you almost fall over in shock. Perhaps we need plain language and plain sentiment for plain times, but such poetry has all the defects of prose (how Shelley would cringe at what Shelleyesque has become) and none of the virtues of poetry. A poetry so limited in its means and devastated in its imaginings is also deadened to its responsibilities—it’s as if poetry meant nothing but a few gestures toward the sentiment of meaning. A Baroque revival must be just around the corner.

Of course no poet means to be dishonest in her responses; but sometimes language itself is a dishonesty, its responses hardened to cliché. Clichés aren’t a neural form of truth; they’re truth frozen into fraud.

When he was a young man, Ezra Pound scribbled a sonnet every morning before breakfast. He had the good sense to throw the whole lot in the fire. A poet doesn’t have to believe the Muse keeps appointments to see the virtues of regimen; and yet there’s something pillowy and fin de siècle in Robert Bly’s self-imposed discipline, to write a poem every morning before rising. Morning Poems[4] has a dozy complacency (you feel some of it was written before waking). The book is composed in simple, declarative sentences, full of “wisdom” and “sentiment,” as if these were ingredients found in any supermarket; and like a Disney cartoon they’re full of talking mice, talking cars, talking cats, talking trees. The poems peter out at sonnet length, the appetite for poetry exhausted where the appetite for breakfast begins.

One day a mouse called to me from his curly

nest:
“How do you sleep? I love curliness.”

“Well, I like to be stretched out. I like my

bones to be
All lined up. I like to see my toes way off

over there.”

“I suppose that’s one way,” the mouse said,

“but I don’t like it.
The planets don’t act that way, nor the Milky

Way.”

What could I say? You know you’re near

the end
Of the century when a sleepy mouse brings

in the Milky Way.

This could hardly be more winsome or sickeningly ingenuous. After a few such trifles, just Aesop without his dentures (I’m especially fond of the talking wheat), a reader might feel he had wandered into a children’s book by mistake.

In their dotage, poets often go from rage to reason: angry young men rarely become angry old ones. An odd peaceableness falls over them, like a comforter, when they draw Social Security (even Pound grew sorry as a pumpkin and shriveled into silence). Bly was once a critic of captious temper, a scourge of bad poetry who would have howled at the portentous hush of poems here (“The angels were certain. But we could not/ Be certain whether our family was worthy tonight”).

Since his days as a devoted imagiste, Bly has become the spokesman for New Age manliness; and whenever you hear of men running through the woods half-naked, beating on drums and declaring their manhood, you know he is partly to blame (the author of Iron John collects a royalty on every drumbeat). Yet something of that earlier poet survives, the poet who wrote reams of antiwar poems, most of them awful, but a few the only lasting poetry to come out of Vietnam.

“The Russians had few doctors on the front

line.
My father’s job was this: after the battle
Was over, he’d walk among the men hit,
Sit down and ask: ‘Would you like to die

on your
Own in a few hours, or should I finish it?’
Most said, ‘Don’t leave me.’ The two would

have
A cigarette. He’d take out his small

notebook—
We had no dogtags, you know—and write

the man’s
Name down, his wife’s, his children, his

address, and what
He wanted to say. When the cigarette was

done,
The soldier would turn his head to the side.

My father
Finished off four hundred men that way

during the war.
He never went crazy. They were his

people.”

This has the war correspondent’s merciless eye, and it’s surprising that Bly’s mercy elsewhere is just a method of sweet-talking the reader. The sugary seductiveness and mythopoeic posturing spoil poems with Auden’s sense of destiny’s accident and fate’s misadventure: “the wind blows an ash/ Into the anarchist’s eye, and he pulls/ The trigger too soon, and kills the King instead of/ The fat factory owner, and then/ A lot of men get on motorcycles.” When wryness softens into whimsy, we’re left with lines like “Some people inside my body last night/ Married each other just in order to dance” or “He knew the moon was made of clogged magma,/ And volcanic rinsings, and punk and dog poop.”

The immanence of nature, the presence of the soul, the farmboy’s earned experience come in for hard salesmanship here. When a poet wants to sell you something, you think you’re listening to some yarn by a genial man on your doorstep, but soon you own forty acres of Florida swamp.

You can see why the British love Les Murray. He fulfills every British cliché about Australians—rough-mannered, Ur-Other rubes in the wilderness, the bastard progeny of jailer and jailed, they’re the Empire’s loyal second-raters. The Australian identity is one of Murray’s favorite subjects. He’s no joiner, and loathes people who are—gritty, doomed independence is another Australian cliché.

It’s too easy to take Murray on his own outsize terms, a great shambling presence presiding over poetry down under (outsize in poetry as well as person—he makes much of being fat). The poetry in Subhuman Redneck Poems[5] ranges from oafish social commentary to reminiscences dark with pathos, from simple descriptions of Fabergé-like intensity to gouts of feckless imagery. He can hardly get through a poem without disaster, and part of reading him is waiting for the disaster to happen—the pleasure isn’t Schadenfreude, it’s suspense.

Murray catches the oddity of nature like a blowsy reincarnation of Marianne Moore: “cormorants with musket-hammer necks, plus/ the clinician spoonbill, its long pout;// twilight’s herons who were almost too lightfoot/ to land; pearl galahs in pink-fronted/ confederacy.” Though he loves to jackhammer his images, he can have the delicate touch of an archeologist:

The impress of a whelk
in hard brown rock,
fluted as a plinth.
Its life gone utterly,

throb, wet and chalk,
left this shape-transmission,

a kin boat of fine brick.
Just off centre is a chip

healed before its death.

This is a series of balanced lines, each just two or three elements in tension; the reader has to read again to be sure that throb is a noun, not a verb. The intelligence of such tension gets into last lines like “For all the death, we also die unrehearsed” or “Beyond choice, we see our loves as indigenes see land,” which take poems out of their small rooms and put them in larger ones.

Murray has the scope and restless bearing of Auden—he’s not afraid of subject, and will tackle any old thing: a hot-air balloon tragedy, Midas given the gift of metaphor, swearing, a retired lighthouse keeper, a genealogical chart as big as the galaxy, a mall inside Ayers Rock, the suburbs as a tale out of Kafka. His poems about an autistic child and a burned child are full of tenderness, without making the reader regret the sympathies of tenderness—the poems do not ask for the compassion they evoke.

There are other poets in Murray, almost all bad ones. Whole poems collapse in a jumble of messy, ungoverned images. He writes of the poor:

Destitution’s an antique. The huge-headed
are sad chaff blown by military bohemians.
Their thin metal bowls are filled or not

from the sky by deodorised descendants
of a tart-tongued womb-noticing noblesse
in the goffered hair-puddings of God’s law

who pumped pioneer bouillons with a potstick,
or of dazzled human muesli poured from ships
under the milk of smoke and decades.

I can make sense of this, more or less (the editorializing is pretty thin), but by the time I get to “human muesli” it hardly seems worth the effort. I find myself rooting for Murray to make his clumsiness a virtue, though it almost never is. If poetry were a primal force, such plenitude would make him an Australian primitive (in poetry, alas, plenitude is a greater vice than parsimony). At times it’s hard to tell, especially when he’s rhyming, whether Murray’s just playing dumb:

We are the Australians. Our history is short.
This makes pastry chefs snotty and racehorses

snort.
It makes pride a blood poppy and work an

export
and bars our trained minds from original

thought… .

You could excuse this in any number of ways—satire is a coiled, venomous form, sometimes turning on form. But the rhymes are just as dreadful elsewhere. The subject is schools:

Where humans can’t leave and mustn’t

complain
there some will emerge who enjoy giving

pain.

Snide universal testing leads them to each one
who will shrivel reliably, whom the rest will

then shun.

Some who might have been chosen, and

natural police,
do routine hurt, the catcalling, the giving no

peace… .

This seems badly translated out of Old Church Slavonic with only a Russian phrase book at hand. Poets of such intelligence can seldom be quoted so plainly against themselves. The loutishness may be calculated; but the more you allow contempt to prove your independence from poetic tradition, the less free you are to invoke that tradition when it suits you. Only by incorporating the unpoetic can the poetic move forward, but bad poetry is no defense against rejection (least of all a revenge for schoolyard rejection). Poetry can give up many things, but when it loses the reader’s trust it becomes hostage to its vices.

Not all American poets stopped writing formal poetry after Life Studies, though sometimes it seems they did. The second free-verse revolution was more radical than the first, and for decades afterwards rhyme and pentameter were as old-fashioned as a whale-bone corset. Edgar Bowers was a Fifties formalist, the best of the coterie surrounding Yvor Winters (himself still an underrated poet). Bowers’s early books, The Form of Loss (1956) and The Astronomers (1965), were ignored for flashier talents like Wilbur and Merrill and darker ones like Hecht. Living Together: New and Selected Poems (1973) added half a dozen poems, but no new book appeared until For Louis Pasteur (1990). There was always something fussy and out of date about Bowers—even when pentameter was the fashion his was stuffy and genteel. The ten poems and a long sequence called “Mazes” new to Collected Poems[6] show the style not changed but amplified. Bowers has remained a Fifties poet, but now that seems a refreshing thing.

Bowers’s lines have a weight, a capaciousness, even a resolve not many poets would attempt anymore. It’s a pleasure to watch enjambment, the slow elaboration of perception through syntax, so artfully deployed (most poets use a hacksaw rather than a scalpel). His stiltedness has a wary subtlety, the mind moving, as if with armed guards, between the range of its particulars and the ruin of its abstractions. Poets rarely give such serious attention to the form of perception.

When Reichenbach treks with Stanley, his

white ears
Are tom-tom, labyrinths of chant, dark speech,
Bull elephants, and lions at night; his eyes
Green branch, black feather, antelope thick

as dust,
Hyenas at bloody offal thieved from lions;
His skin the fly, the thing that crawls… .

The dense and weedy phrases, unusual in a poet at ease with extinction, crowd the jungle of these lines. Imagery is often the narrative of a syntax, and few poets are as alert to the river-turnings and oxbows a sentence offers up.

His quiet manner hides a fatalistic humor. In “The Poet Orders His Tomb,” the tomb is decorated with a nightmarish menagerie:

Dogs in the frozen haloes of their barks,

A hundred porous arks
Aground and lost, where elephants like quarks
Ape mother mules or imitation sharks—

And each of them half-venerated by

A mob, impartially
Scaled, finned, or feathered, all before a dry
Unable mouth, symmetrically awry.

This is a little like Michelangelo working his own flayed skin into his painting of the Last Judgment. Even Bowers’s best poems, unfortunately, come with defects intimate in the style: phrases stiff-jointed or trite, musty Latin polysyllables, a clutch of Miltonic inversions (They moped back severe! Books cosmic!). Without their defects poets often lose their graces—sometimes their defects allow those graces. That does not make the defects less irritating.

Bowers has a gift for writing poems withdrawn and a little shy of statement. Many are portraits of young male friends, some just glances out the window. He’s never lost a Fifties taste for the Greek gods —they elbow their way in even when they’re not wanted. At a poetry reading in California, the gods rise within the voice of a minor poet; and soon the fatal arrow is aimed at Achilles. I’ve been to many poetry readings and never seen that.

The god that haunts Bowers is the god of war. His speaker meets a German general on his sickbed:

I thought I saw
For him the summer uniforms in snow,
Partisans, savage reprisals, day-long strafing,
Long lines of prisoners never to return,
Comrades armless, legless, and blind. But he,
Clutching my sleeve to pull me closer,

whispered,
“It was the SS did it, not my men.
The week before the armistice, they took
Three just-conscripted boys who were afraid
And hanged them, German children, the sky

green
Above the uniforms too big for them,
As we saw when we found and cut them

down.
It was then that I despaired to live or die.”

The Hanged Man appears twice in these poems, like something out of Madame Sosostris’s tarot pack; but the images of war provoke Bowers to passions hidden and unresolved in a life devoted to the cozy truces of academia. In half a dozen poems, in “Clear-seeing,” “Clothes” (the splendid ending is a view of a mountain, “its double peaks the victory sign”), “Two Poems on the Catholic Bavarians,” “The Prince,” and “Aix-la-Chapelle, 1945,” the passions of war, and the smudged line between victor and victim, suggest in suffering and sacrifice the Passion of Christ. The late poems of moral existence complete the work of half a century before.

Much of the poetry forgotten in the sea-change that followed Life Studies was written by poets who were stiffer versions of Auden, less flexible in intellect, less twisted by irony (followers are not more or less; they’re always less)—what Pound would have called the bureaucracy organized around genius. At this distance their elaborations look more like an achievement; and it may be the moment, when we are about to have a Lowell revival, to look at the discarded early work of Karl Shapiro, Louis Simpson, Philip Levine, and other poets who came to grief in free verse. Edgar Bowers shows how much could have been accomplished, in a quiet, unassuming way, by keeping the faith.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. Black Zodiac, by Charles Wright; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 85 pages, $19. Go back to the text.
2. The Alamo: An Epic, by Michael Lind; Houghton Mifflin, 351 pages, $25. Go back to the text.
3. West Wind, by Mary Oliver; Houghton Mifflin, 63 pages, $21. Go back to the text.
4. Morning Poems, by Robert Bly; HarperCollins, 109 pages, $23. Go back to the text.
5. Subhuman Redneck Poems, by Les Murray; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 104 pages, $18. Go back to the text.
6. Collected Poems, by Edgar Bowers; Alfred A. Knopf, 168 pages, $25. Go back to the text.