If you want to know what it’s like for Sharon Olds to menstruate, or squeeze her oil-filled pores, or discover her naked father shitting, Blood, Tin, Straw[1] will tell you. If you want to know what her sex life is like (it’s wonderful, trust her!), she’ll tell you, and tell you in prurient, anatomical detail the Greek philosophers would have killed for—she’s the empirical queen of lovemaking, of every secret session of the body.

If I could change one physical thing
about myself, I would retract those tiny
twilit lips which appeared at the mouth
of my body when the children’s heads pressed

out, I would
haul back up into heaven those little
ladder-tatters, although in the crush
between the babies’ skull-plates and the skin
of the birth-gates, I wanted the symphysis
more cherished—and he seems to like those

bruised
celestial wattles, their clasp, their tip-of-
seraph-pinion purple. They are
the last licks that the other world took,
crown to sole, along each darling,
he kisses a god’s small tongues in them
and they soul-kiss him back.

Aristotle would have loved her metaphors, her anatomy lessons (and how he would have delighted in symphysis). I should have stopped quoting after half-a-dozen lines; but part of the hypnotic fascination of Olds’s poetry is its headlong, hell-for-leather hubris—you never know what’s coming next, but you’re sure it’s going to be a disaster. She may start a poem complaining about her labia, but, before she’s through, her womb is heaven and her husband’s French-kissing her god-tongues. (You’d think the god’s small tongue would be the clitoris. How lucky of Olds to have more than one.)

Readers now thumb through Olds to get to the good parts, as teenagers a generation ago furtively paged through their parents’ copy of Peyton Place. She trades in shameless prose chopped up into lines of poetry, lurid as a tabloid, returning to the primal scene more often than a therapist: her cold, sadistic father; her cold, masochistic mother; the chair her parents tied her to; the birth of her children; her nipples; and always, always, her marriage bed. If someone is raped in her apartment building, we never hear about the victim. We’re told instead about Olds having sex the next day:

The day after we heard about it,
we made love, in the morning, he entered

me
and I thought, It’s not so bad, I could hardly

feel anything,
just something hard going in and out of me
somewhere far away down my body
like something seen from a distance, an

ocean liner
going down twenty miles away.

An ocean liner? For sheer tastelessness Olds can scarcely be bettered. The premise may be some poor woman’s rape, but the conclusion’s all Sharon, Sharon, Sharon! A poet less selfish would have written about selfishness, about the inability to empathize, but Olds can barely get out of bed, can manage only extraneous thoughts about the rapist, “sealed and unfruitful.” When elsewhere she revisits the rape and murder of a grade-school classmate, a sickening incident from her first book, Satan Says (1980), the poem’s still mostly about Sharon Olds.

Misapplication of intensity is her cardinal vice: everywhere brute shock is taken as a sign of honesty (shock eventually makes the reader shockproof); finally it becomes just a form of self-promotion. Olds has as many teases as a strip show, and the psychology that drives her poetry is dourly exhibitionist: that is, a form of punishment and abasement. “Look at me! Look at me!,” the poems say, poems of someone never loved enough. She’ll imagine her corpse rotting underground (“my face sluicing off me,/ my Calvinist lips blooming little/ broccolis”), or the last moments of the astronaut Christa McAuliffe (“as if God touched/ her brain with a thumb and it went out, like a mercy killing”), or the screams of a napalmed Vietnamese girl in a famous news photograph. She loves to rub your nose in it: if you look away, you’re a coward; if you keep looking, you’re complicit.

Olds is sometimes mistaken for a confessional poet, but she has nothing to confess: she never feels anything as subtle or scouring as guilt, and it’s hard to believe she’d recognize a sin if it bit her. Her poems are striking, thorough, vivid as a bullet wound, and written without taste or depth. She flaunts the crimes against her childhood until they become rubbed-over morality tales. Don’t think too long about a little girl deprived of love who’s now an exhibitionist, who wants “to be/ fucked blind, pummelled half dead with it.”

And sexual love, what if it
is mostly sex, the cunt wanting
to swallow, swallow, fiercely sing all
day all night, what if I’m a selfish
fucker feeding on his pleasure.

Poetry in our prudent hour needs more sex, not less, and Olds may someday become the laureate of the bedroom; but for all her radical pretense (she claims if she hadn’t married she’d have been a Weatherman bomber), she’s a homely Redbook moralist, believing in motherhood, family, and honey on her nipples. By the time she’s reduced to giving sex tips, or calling her husband’s member “the errless digit,” all her shallow pretense is greedily on display. The sadism is safe, but de Sade would have run screaming from her bedroom.

Glyn Maxwell is one of the young Turks of British poetry. He whooped onto the scene less than a decade ago, all twitchy invention and Audenesque manner, making more noise than a wrecking crew. To the mild, sleepy ambitions of Nineties British poetry (which often seemed devoted to building a better mousetrap, one too small for a mouse), the sprezzatura of his verse was a rude surprise. The brashness of his early books makes more impressive the maturity and gathered power of The Breakage,[2] the first of his books to be published in America.

The slyly reserved, good-natured poems in The Breakage don’t make a lot of fuss. They know their job of work and set out to finish it, but they’re often slightly private affairs, as if they weren’t all that keen on letting you know where they’re going. Their simplicity of diction and slightly bewildered, even childlike speakers are deceptive. Much of the book is haunted by World War I, for poetry the most defining conflict since the French Revolution. The horrors of the war were no more horrible, though more sustained and grinding, than those of our Civil War. Thomas and Owen learned their realism in the trenches; out of the trenches, the prewar decadence of Imagism and vers libre—which reek of French cafés and absinthe, and might have lost their way in smoky aestheticism—was annealed into the harsh psychologies of modernism.

The war has continued to trouble British poetry, most brutally in the poems of Geoffrey Hill. (In British and American poetry World War II scarcely exists, not a denial of the death camps as much as mute acknowledgment of their moral silencing.) To Maxwell’s generation, World War I was the war of grandfathers and great-grandfathers, but its losses still scar the landscape of village and family.

Valentines at the Front

Valentine’s Day anywhere the boys are,
Grouped around the sack that might as well be
Kicking like a caught thing, like a prisoner,
They sort it out so rapidly, then slowly.

They lean back amazed, then not at all amazed
At tissues ringed and arrowed to them. Plainly
This pattered here from home like a dim beast
Only the English feed. It would never guess

There is no place like home, and in home’s

place
Are these who sit befuddled in a fosse,
Crumpling the colour white and the colour

pink
Away like news of some far Allied loss

That’s one too many. Now they can only

think
It’s rained so long the past has burst its sides
And spilled into the future in the ink
Of untold villages of untold brides.

It hardly registers at first that the sack is a mailsack, the boys are soldiers handing out letters that turn out to be Valentines. The tissued romantic sentiments look ridiculous amid the mud (and aren’t the crumpled white and pink like wounded flesh?), then not so ridiculous, if home is what you fight to return to. There won’t be many grooms demobbing in those villages of would-be brides (and untold trembles with the ambiguity of number, of ignorance).

In his early poems Maxwell couldn’t bear not to be clever, and they often became mere foolery (a phrase like “befuddled in a fosse” is a reminder of the little stings his tongue likes to inflict). Now their drollery has a darker cast: he allows these poems to seem slight, airy nothings, then gradually turns up the pressure. A giddy Georgian holiday—a child’s view of everything that prevents his family from making an excursion to the seaside—ends with a waltz that turns to shellfire. Maxwell hears the seashell in shellfire, knows what battles are commemorated in taking a cab round Trafalgar Square, trying to catch a train at Waterloo Station. A tender sequence of letters to Edward Thomas starts in jest, squibs written by friends surprised not to find him in his cottage (it’s not clear if he’s not in his cottage because he’s at the front); it starts in jest but ends in elegy.

Maxwell writes in a meter sometimes like rough carpentry, a language often homely and well-worn. Educated at Oxford, that hothouse of British cleverness (where John Fuller has encouraged young poets for thirty years or more), but also at Boston University under Derek Walcott, Maxwell has taken his influences broadly, stolen shamelessly—in his early poems you were constantly running into IOUs to Frost, or Larkin, or Auden. His Moon Country (1996), written with another young Turk, Simon Armitage, attempted to recapture the road-movie bonhomie of Letters from Iceland, but the young Turks were more Hope and Crosby than Auden and Isherwood.

In The Breakage Maxwell has paid back his debts, acknowledging what he owes, and gloriously become like no one but himself. At times he seems a throwback to a more old-fashioned style of poem-making: he’s sacrificed high spirits (well, not all his high spirits) for a barrister’s solidity. The poems are often a little aloof, half warning the reader away—it’s hard not to read them twice, and hard to understand them until you read them twice. There are still mistakes (an homage to Frost is ruined when the last stanza descends into the dopey patois of “I woulda jogged forever if I coulda”), but Maxwell has learned to do what all good poets do—he makes a world fresh again, a world you never knew existed.

Philip Levine’s The Mercy[3] reminds me of those peeling WPA murals that still sometimes adorn post office lobbies. Muscled young men and strapping young women stride nobly across the fields and through the factories of America, doing noble work (they have the physiques of professional wrestlers and expressions to match). There is a whiff of Stalinism about them, of muscles equal to moral virtue (it was one of those periods when health didn’t make wealth, it made art), of blind faith in soil, and hard work, and square dealing, and labor unions.

Levine was raised in Depression-era Detroit, a city of the heart he has memorialized ever since. He has a rich fantasy life devoted to serving in the Spanish Civil War (at the end of which he’d have been all of eleven), and to meeting, or almost meeting, or wishing he had met, poets like Lorca, Pavese, Vallejo. At best he captures the spirit of a lost past where boys went looking for girls at Young Communists meetings:

I’ll spare you the argument
with the one decent girl who called Reuther
a little fascist, the turn-table that ground out
“Petrushka” over and over with a will
of its own, the posters for Henry Wallace,
the plywood square for dancing where two

girls
in chinos and sweaters frowned under a bare

bulb,
the brick and board bookcase and its virgin

copies
of Das Kapital and Jack London’s novels.

All the desire sublimated by Old Left politics is there, down to the virgins, if they are virgins, slouching near the virgin books. Levine has become our mortal sentimentalist, wringing his hands over immigrant life, factory work, dulled and stunted dreams, as if the lives were their own virtue, as if all a poet had to do were strip naked and go around shouting, “I am human. I have feelings.”

A lot of poets want to offer up the lives and leave the art to look after itself; and on occasion a stray incident, an accidental phrase, is enough by itself. Here an uncle speaks:

“It was the beginning of autumn,
the little noiseless Asian rains poured
their waters down on us until we
slept on duty in our wet uniforms
leaning into each other like kittens.
A man alone would walk off the road
into an open field to find his sleep.”

This starts like “poetry” (no uncle ever really spoke this way), but then something happens: leaning into each other like kittens! The exhausted soldiers aren’t as innocent or safe as kittens, but you wish they were and they must wish they were (and for a moment, in the image, they are). The comforts of the domestic world are almost a rebuke, but they rise with a measure of longing. You never know when poetry is going to take over from “poetry,” and even the poet himself may not know. Alas, Levine never seems to realize that such a phrase creates a world invulnerable to the malformations of emotion, so he goes on squeezing the poem for tears; and eventually he gets them, even if they’re only his own.

Levine was a tough guy in verse, once, and a pretty funny tough guy. Readers who know only the poems of his middle and old age should look back at the books of the Sixties and early Seventies. For more than two decades he has labored in his mawkish wallow, ransacking his muddy version of Americana for out-of-the-mud transcendence.

Do you know how to read the wind? Do you?
It’s easy. Just close your eyes and listen.
Of course you have to be old, broken
in body and spirit, brought down so low—
as Lungo was—that even words make sense.

Levine is an old, accomplished artisan. You trust the leathery tone, the rueful air, the sly jokes at his own expense. He long ago learned how to shape a sentence, and sometimes you can almost see him measure one by eye and plane it with his hands. I once saw a glassblower in Venice with such hands. He took the glaring bulb of glass from the furnace with his glassblower’s pipe, and blew it and shaped it as it glowed. At each step it was a thing of extraordinary beauty, a bow toward the antique arts. In the end he gave a deft twist, a knowing knock, then held it out—and Ecco!, it was an ashtray.

Poetry is the easiest of the arts, next to painting. Any fool can write poetry, and many fools do. You just look into your heart, and write—and mostly what you write are lines that bring tears to the eyes of wives, or mothers, or poetry critics (or husbands, fathers, and poetry critics). When a non-poet writes poetry, generally you get the conventions of a century ago, or sentiment so crippled even the greeting-card industry would turn up its nose. But a non-poet isn’t bound to the tacit conventions of contemporary verse. Not knowing the rules, he doesn’t mind breaking the rules, and poetry only advances when the unwritten rules are broken.

David Mamet’s secret life as a poet might have borrowed the splintered rhythms that made American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross and Oleanna studies in vernacular corruption and betrayal. The language of the stage and the language of poetry were once the same language, because they studied the same rhythms: poetry hasn’t recovered since plays abandoned pentameter and took to prose. Romantics persist in believing the true language of poetry is Wordsworth’s “real language of men,” which has been Mamet’s stock in trade, but Wordsworth’s real language was still the rough trade of pentameter.

You can be mediocre in any number of genres, but a genius only in one—the exceptions are few. When a distinguished playwright publishes his verses, therefore, a betting man roots for them but bets against them. Alas, the poems in The Chinaman[4] are grotesque, unlovely things that look as if they’d been abandoned at an orphanage and rejected by the orphanage, too.

We turned back, as who could then not,
To a snapped rotten snap which kept the

skater on the bank
Til cries of men who rushed the ladder to the

pond
When whose son disappeared.
With folly to shore up
The afternoon
If that well of self-pity announced itself

deplete.

It’s hard to know how to untangle these sentences, if they are sentences: the words seem to have fallen out of a Shake ’N Bake bag. Mamet’s all too eager to show off his fustian, preposterous diction, a freshman’s dream of what philosophers sound like:

When we await the Moshiach
And less-though-cognate sublunary aid
We line our wrongs into a cadenced march
As if each wrenching turn for the worse
Could not but appeal
To the theatrical sense
Of that-which-knows-we suffer
And create desire for resolution.

“That-which-knows-we suffer” might be God, but by then who cares? When you read Mamet you realize how difficult it is, even for a man of taste and reading (and considerable self-opinion), to write a good line. He can pretend to know what he’s doing, because pretense is a gesture of the stage, without ever realizing the comic hash he’s made of his emotions.

I thought I knew
What love was
Before I met you
But I did not know.

Many years have passed
In the pineapple bed.
Clothes mended and torn
Four times we saw them paint
The music room.
Children were born.
We moved toward
Converse with the noble dead.

The noble dead! Just the right sententious note. Mamet must have written these things all on his own, because he had no help from an editor. The punctuation comes and goes (mostly the syntax just goes); there are two-dollar words in ten-cent sentences (and words like “anappositeness” and “Mamleuke” that must be typos—though shouldn’t Mamet have noticed the persistent misspelling of Glengarry Glen Ross?), capital letters scattered with abandon, and occasionally a shorthand that has lost contact with the outside world (like Stanley groping his way toward Livingston):

To puff the spirits of that day,
and anomie by talisman.

The puissant Boulder Purey.
Boats in a green shed, that polio summer,
when they winched the behemoth

submersible
athwart the Outer Drive,
boys lured in cars became dead
in the waste space a courtesy title had as
the Bird Sanctuary.

You want to quote and quote until the tears start. Not all the poetry is as bad as this; some is much more embarrassing. (I haven’t the heart to quote the silly, racist title poem.) A playwright lives by his ear: he must present the simulacra of conversation, what we believe conversation to be, with its tensions and fraught meanings, its Freudian mistakes, Empsonian ambiguities, Pavlovian repetitions. A good playwright writes close to the edge of accident, while understanding the stagecraft passed down from one generation of playwrights to another —how to manage an exit, when to double a part, what advantages come from stripping the stage of scenery. Some of the craft a poet knows is just as important, as these poems so naked of craft plainly show. The good news is, Mamet isn’t giving up playwriting for poetry. The bad news is, Harold Pinter also writes poems, and they’re worse.

Joe Bolton killed himself in 1990 at the age of twenty-eight. The Last Nostalgia,[5] his collected poems, comes with the particular taint and grace to which the books of suicides are susceptible. Even to mention his death in the first sentence of a review is to succumb to a romance never romantic to those who have to clean up afterwards. If I choose to review a man who was once my student, I break a rule because his posthumous reputation does him no good, and because these poems are astonishing in their delicate, rueful agonies—boyish, romantic poems with a long, bruised perspective. He wrote the poems Raymond Carver’s characters would write if they could write poetry. (They’re the poems Raymond Carver would have written if he could have written poetry.)

Like most young poets, Bolton found poetry a form for repetitive anxieties, a lyric bulwark against the narrative his life threatened to become—a run of broken romances punctuated by divorce. He was born in Kentucky and raised in the Jackson Purchase, the son of schoolteachers. He drifted from writing program to writing program, one of the faceless mass of migrant young poets—proud, nervous, a young man rawboned and whiskey-voiced, a chain-smoker who looked prematurely worn out. Outside his narrow influences, he didn’t have much room to absorb poetry, so the intensity and finish of his verse are marked by sometimes grinding repetition —there are times when you think if he wakes up in one more motel room with one more girl, you’ll kill him yourself. But he’s capable of scenes that make the fraught circumstances of life into the framing instances of art.

On the Square

It could be any Southern town you care to

name:
Bank, diner, hardware store, lone traffic light.
Saturdays, you come to buy everything
That can’t be grown, contrived, or done

without.
Old men sit spitting on the courthouse steps.
A boy in a Camaro squeals, once, his wide

new tires.
Women test their reflections in the windows

of the shops
They pass, hoping to find some lost beauty

restored.

And when those eyes, for a moment, hold

yours, they seem
To hold some insolence. You think they

think you
Are guilty of some crime beyond the crime
All are guilty of. And oh, my dear, they do!
And so do you.

The special, fierce confidence of this, the scene exactly controlled until it can be released into the symbolic realm (he handles rhythm as if it were psychology), shows how closely he studied what models he had, studied them until he could turn them into himself. He was drawn to Baudelaire and Vallejo, whose poems he imitated and transformed, and to those haggard Americans of pastoral loneliness, James Wright and Richard Hugo. In delicate syntax and lush adjective, however, in the slight hesitation between act and judgment (how easily the longings of these lines turn to mild accusation), he was a student of his teacher Donald Justice, who has edited these poems and given them fond, acute introduction.

Bolton had a restless imagination, capable of the sly tensions of free verse, but longing for the restraints of form (his sonnets make most New Formalist poems look dogged and academic). His easygoing, unaffected style slips from the details of this affair, that town, into losses nearly heartbreaking. He finds

Some pulsing rhythm among the soft globes
Of the streetlamps, and something hopelessly
Romantic in the way the points of palms

Aspire to a sky already fading.
(It is only the legend of your youth
Lost to all the real things you learned to love.)

Fifty miles away, the Gulf of Mexico
Teases the nostrils, rousing a desire
Bacardi and cigarettes cannot cure,

And which no well-intentioned lover
Can fulfill wholly or for long. It is
Always yourself again, left all alone

At evening’s end, strolling down the same

street
You knew the dead end to by heart in

childhood,
But somehow lovelier than you remembered...

—Especially at this late hour when, to the

west,
The twilight plays the game it loves to lose
And loses, over and over, to its dark sea.

These lines were for Hart Crane, and are typical of Bolton’s modesty (and obsession with early death), a modesty that sometimes faltered toward romantic self-pity. He lets the revelations come quietly, if they come at all—patient, sometimes dangerously close to being a voyeur, he was a poet who loved the old routines and was daring enough to try to pull them off. I don’t know any young poet who had his lack of vanity. The lulling, hypnotic rhythms are more uneasy than they seem.

Florida Twilight, 1905
(St. Augustine)

Returning late, the flushed West to the right,
One saw, aligned against the golden sky
(The very throne-robe of the star-crowned

night),
Black palms, a frieze of chiseled ebony.
And even at the moment one resolved
Not to come back, the scent of fruit and

flowers
Brought on a sadness as the past dissolved:
Arcades, courts, arches, fountains, lordly

towers. . . .

The shore of sunset and the palms,

meanwhile—
Late shade giving over to greater shade—
What were they? With what did they have to

do?
It was like myriad pictures of the Nile,
But with a History yet to be made,
A world already lost that was still new.

Bolton has stolen some of these phrases from Henry James’s The American Scene, in conscious imitation of a lovely sonnet by Justice (I have taken a liberty by correcting a typo here). This was the close act of attention he offered, to read James through Justice and Justice through James until he knew how to control, and how to create through control, the “nostalgic rage,” as James called it.

These seductive poems, often voluptuous with emotion, have a guarded, gloomy purity, wounding themselves into excess. They had so many possible ways of going wrong, it’s breathtaking how often their flirtation with the mysterious went right. The phrases elsewhere are remarkably plain, scrubbed of adjective: his quieter effects take time to develop and are therefore harder to quote to advantage. Bolton was never fully formed, a poet still surprising to himself: he wrote compulsively, and at times his poems inhabit a claustrophobic world like Hardy’s, their sorrows and disorders repeated in terrified order. As his editor notes, there is little development or change—there is even, perhaps, a decline toward the end.

Bolton shot himself the day after turning in his master’s thesis, which may have seemed an end of sorts. Before his death he announced to a friend that he had given up poetry. He published one private-press book before he died; a posthumous volume, Days of Summer Gone (1990), was not widely noticed. The Last Nostalgia is essentially that master’s thesis, which included his two books and two other manuscripts. Justice has added two dozen uncollected poems.

An early death, a poet’s early death, informs all the poems written. A fatal accident is an act of fate, but suicide is an act of will and therefore can be seen as an artist’s gesture, the flourish with which the work is signed, the lethal autograph that announces the work is finished. Sylvia Plath is the most famous example of the suicide’s Faustian bargain—you achieve the fame you long for, but aren’t around to enjoy it; your poems may be read by millions, but always through the distorting lens of your death. Yet often death is what the poems tried to forestall—in his poems the poet uses up his life until he has nothing left. Suicide often seems to follow the last kenosis or emptying out of imagination.

Bolton wrote the poems life would allow, poems with a thrilling sense of death postponed. They are brutal, lonely poems, stark with erotic longing, but tender in their submission to loss. His love affairs seem transient, and there is nothing in them beyond the physical—“we” and “us” must be his rarest pronouns. It is disturbing to think what he might have written, had he hated himself a little less and lived a little longer. I may be forgiven for valuing him highly now, when I feel that once I undervalued him.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. Blood, Tin, Straw, by Sharon Olds; Alfred A. Knopf, 125 pages, $24, $15 paper. Go back to the text.
2. The Breakage, by Glyn Maxwell; Houghton Mifflin, 81 pages, $22. Go back to the text.
3. The Mercy, by Philip Levine; Alfred A. Knopf, 81 pages, $22. Go back to the text.
4. The Chinaman, by David Mamet; Overlook Press, 72 pages, $19.95. Go back to the text.
5. The Last Nostalgia: Poems 1982–1990, by Joe Bolton, edited by Donald Justice; University of Arkansas Press, 206 pages, $24 paper. Go back to the text.