Mitteleuropa Surrealism isn’t what it was when the Balkans, the Orthodox Church, and the Ottoman Empire brooded in the background. Surrealist poems, those uncompromising, gritty, erotic protests against logic or meaning, were once the dreams Kafka suffered, the dreams of an insurance clerk. In America, Surrealists like Charles Simic write like this:

They had already attached the evening’s

tears to the windowpanes.
The general was busy with the ant farm

in his head.
The holy saints in their tombs were burning,

all except one who was a prisoner of a

dark-haired movie star.

Fanciful, mild-mannered (you’re in danger of stubbing your toe on the meaning), the poems in Walking the Black Cat[1] often sound like translations, or merely like translators. (Many American Surrealists seem to know the originals only in translation—why shouldn’t they sound like translators?) Surrealism isn’t the same in a land of Burger Heaven, Frito Banditos, and drive-in movies.

Simic’s poems favor whimsical, offbeat subjects: bad TV reception, kitchen implements that talk back, a charm-school proprietor, a garden of barbed wire. Or they’re about wives, playing cards, cats (a lot of cats), ghosts, any old thing, as long as it can be treated in easy-chair fashion. At worst the poems break down into a shudder of random statement and low-voltage detail: “The blue trees argue with the red wind.// The white mare has a peacock for a servant.” Who would have thought even Surrealism would come down to its clichés?

Simic wasn’t always so civilized. His childhood was spent in Yugoslavia and his first language was Serbo-Croatian, so he knew about war (as a boy he stole helmets and ammunition from dead German soldiers). There was a quiet menace to his early books, Dismantling the Silence (1971) and Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk (1974), the precision of nightmare made flesh. When he was young, he knew how to be savage (the arthritis set in long before he won his Pulitzer). Now he can barely be bothered to put two spirited words together. His poems exist in moral negation —there’s no living emotion anymore, just literary hamming (for him, the emotion was once in the seeing). His wiseguy manner is a defense against feeling, which is fine if your readers are refrigerators.

Rocky was a regular guy, a loyal friend.
The trouble was he was only a cat.
Let’s practice, he’d say, and he’d pounce
On his shadow on the wall.

When a poem begins like this, you hope it was written at gunpoint.

Sometimes Simic starts smirking, as if he thought he were Ashbery or Tate. Only a few lines remind you of the poet he once was (when time and eternity “Cast no image/ As they admire themselves in the mirror,” you think—Oh! Vampires!). A poem titled “Slaughterhouse Flies” (“Evenings, they ran their bloody feet/ Over the pages of my schoolbooks”) is suggestive and creepy, and “Cameo Appearance” treats politics as Beckett might. But too often now Simic sounds like a poet working on a merit badge. Poetry isn’t suited to aesthetic denial, unless you’re an ascetic; and it isn’t suited to emotional denial, either, unless you’re one of the living dead.

A. R. Ammons has always been a crotchety, damaged, unlikely poet, a modern Diogenes living in a bathtub and grousing about nature and metaphysics. If he starts a poem, “Rock frozen and fractured/ spills, a shambles,” you know he’ll soon come to phrases like “tiers of time” and “metaphysical debris.” He can’t walk through a forest without being bushwhacked by mortality and ontology (you end up thinking he couldn’t possibly walk through that many forests). Most people go to the forests to get away from the metaphysics.

Words like thicket and parameter are always suggestive together, as long as you don’t try to explain why they’re suggestive. The naked concrete noun and the naked abstract term are a marriage made in Plato’s cave (and attended by Shrödinger’s cat). Ammons records the transient, devious nature of mind at meditation; and his best poems tend to be large, unfolding roadmaps of passing fancy, AAA Triptiks through all the small towns of the brain.

In a time of big cars, a small car raises eyebrows:
this law, lowly derived, is as high as any

other sky:
contempt, amusement, curiosity: but if then

the cars

switched, big to small, the law would remain

the same:
another law, older than Kepler: (trilliums

by the
trillion whitened the slopes broken down

by brooks,

I noticed the other day as I rode in my car,

small, as
it happened): I don’t know: I just have a few

words
to say: it’s not my world, no: even though

it is

the only world and, so, mine or not, mine… .

This is an ungainly mixture of genius and junk—Ammons would be preening at the Apocalypse, but always noticing, noticing, noticing. He’s a poet whose faults are hard to like and whose virtues hard to respect. His last book, titled Garbage (with a leaden dose of irony), was a splendidly out-at-elbows treatise on all our junk dreams. Brink Road[2] is itself a bottom drawer of a book, some of the poems uncollected for more than two decades, most of them expressions of a mode long perfected: the poems jigger this way and that, argue out of both sides of their mouths—they’re pell-mell, hobble-knobble, zigzag affairs, fretful and confounding by turns.

There’s little to protect such poetry from prose, and often all that salvages it from prose are the white spaces—only the spaces of poetry make this poetry. Without them, we would be left with:

Poems are forms of protective coloration by which a person insecure in his true colors takes trial stances of coloration to imitate true colors or to baffle detection, either by simple baffling or by adopting disguise of common conventions or to direct attention from his differences by putting on the unconventional act… .

Ammons’s flaws are so disfiguring it’s impossible not to notice them: a lot of his poems are tedious (you trudge through the physics to get to the nature, but it wasn’t worth the trudge); they’re ponderous, muddled performances, terrible and trivial at once, like an elephant balanced on a pinhead. Just when you fall in love with a stripped-bare description of the natural world, or an improbable insight into the human, he’ll start a poem, “Anxiety clears meat chunks out of the stew, carrots, takes/ the skimmer to floats of greasy globules,” or succumb to blather like “The flow-finding of the making impulse/ rounds the curve, of what-is/ and shakes out scaffolding/ suitable to the outline of the perception… .” He’ll end a confused rumination on the limits of nature with a line so awful it ought to receive some sort of prize: “remarkable sucked fizzy drinks burning the mucous.”

Ammons doesn’t always take himself seriously—a big galoot of a poet, he’s proud of being nearly unreadable (his poems “bowing to no one, nonpatronizing and ungrateful”), but knows he likes to be read. You can tell it gets under his skin when a review says he falls “far short of Stevens”— but it’s true, he does fall far short of Stevens. Often he falls far short of Ammons (when he refers to Stevens, he soon drags in the Flintstones, too). He’s not the philosopher-in-a-banker’s-suit Stevens or the woodsy moral-hunter Frost, though he’s a bit of a Yankee (by adoption) and was once a bit of a business executive. And yet. And yet, he’s a much deeper poet than he sometimes appears to be (a poet who can write, “The quickest/ way/ to change// the/ world is/ to// like it/ the/ way it// is,” has no business being deep); and in glimpses, at odd angles, the mortal lessons take the prosy metaphysics into pressures you never thought they could survive. He thinks about the world in a way poets rarely do, but only his “tinctured core of brutality” redeems means so limited and yet so grandiose.

Robert Hass is a man of letters in the California mode, devotee of Eastern philosophy but also Eastern Europe, translator of classical haiku as well as Czeslaw Milosz. His rangy, laid-back essays, collected in Twentieth Century Pleasures (1984), are the record of a reader, a reader in love (such a meticulous nurse of his own pulse he’s almost a hypochondriac). There’s a goofy, Summer of Love innocence to his poems (few serious poets would attempt an aria about snot), but also a sharp-eyed suspicion of authority, especially the romantic authority of poetry itself.

Sun Under Wood[3] is full of romantic gestures. Hass can scarcely pass a tree without falling into a swoon—he would love to have written “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.”

This morning in the early sun,
steam rising from the pond the color of smoky

topaz,
a pair of delicate, copper-red, needle-fine

insects
are mating in the unopened crown of a Shasta

daisy… .

Such lines are ravishing, blooming into vision like Impressionist paintings; but every swoon comes with its little load of guilt and shame. Hass has grown increasingly skeptical of poetry’s illusion, and many of these poems are about writing poems. He’ll start a poem, “Maybe you need to write a poem about grace,” or remark on a description of creek stones, “It is good sometimes that poetry should disenchant us,/ I wrote, and something about ‘the heart’s huge vacancy,’/ which seemed contemptible.” A poem titled “Layover” is followed by the prose poem “Notes on ‘Layover,’” details and incidents he might have included, but did not.

The fashionable term for such radical nihilism is deconstruction (not so fashionable, if even poets are familiar with it), but it’s often hall-of-mirrors narcissism. Most readers assume a poem was written, that a writer did not compose in the heat of battle or passion the words that lie so easily on the page. Few readers want to be told, line by line, that the ink dried up, the writer was hungry, the visitor from Porlock was knocking on the front door again, because few readers want to be treated as slightly retarded.

Hass’s dry self-examinations have a faintly puritanical edge, as if the reader’s sublimation in pleasure were illicit. The midget commissar at the center of his verse can never admit that even the breaking of illusion is an illusion—the writer was writing then, too. Many of the Poet Laureate’s new poems, when they aren’t about his own poems, are ragbag suites or odes, flitting from subject to subject (a poet tired of “subjects” is often reduced to writing about writing), their concerns unified only by the writer’s illusion of impulse—they are the progress of their own pathology. A poem that moves from his broken marriage through a brother’s crack addiction, a trip to Korea, Derrida, and torture yearns to make things whole. The memorable lines have nothing to do with arthouse artifice.

In the town center
of Kwangju, there was a late October market

fair.
Some guy was barbecuing halfs of baby chicks

on a long, sooty contraption
of a grill, slathering them with soy sauce.

Baby chicks.

This has the somewhat studied common touch (“Some guy …”), but it’s direct and discomforting. When he writes of his marriage or his alcoholic mother, the intensity of emotion overcomes his primness about illusion; yet such passages cannot atone for the aimless notebook narratives, the occasional giddy awfulness (little songs about his mother’s nipples: “What could be more fair/ than les nipples de ma mère?”), or a few lines of callow self-absorption (“There ought to be some single word/ For the misery of divorce./ It dines upon you casually/duh-dduh-duh-duh-dduh-fierce/remorse/pierce”).

Hass is at times a rare and original poet. He’s willing to try things no one else would, and willing to fail at them, too (and contemplate the failure, and bat it around with his paw). His sweet, aw-shucks reasonableness can get on your nerves—he doesn’t have much time for catharsis or pity. If he’s a blander version of Rexroth, he reminds you of a time when we had autodidacts and iconoclasts like Rexroth. Hass’s better poems sustain themselves within their ambiguities, acknowledging the pain they work hard to avert.

She says to him, musing, “If you ever

leave me,
and marry a younger woman and have

another baby,
I’ll put a knife in your heart.” They are in bed,
so she climbs onto his chest, and looks directly
down into his eyes. “You understand? Your

heart.”

In a poet uncomfortable with the sly suggestiveness of language, “musing” is all too suggestive of a muse whose looks could kill.

Sigmund Freud of voyeurs, analyst and analysand of complex states of watching, C. K. Williams has accepted the labor of observation with an almost religious devotion. We look to religion for words like passion, which has infected our image of love with a theology of suffering. In The Vigil,[4] as in his recent books, Williams has turned the long verse line of Whitman, that brawny lover of men, of laborers and loungers, into the medium of modern urban anxiety, of naked souls in the naked city. It is not without religious instinct that such densely neurotic notation of the inner life has been called confession.

Williams is a smalltown, Sinclair Lewis busybody about the lives of others—a store clerk murdered in a hold-up, his dying caught on camera; an old acquaintance beaten to death in an alley; a retarded woman given a peanut to eat before a little audience of ladies; a neighbor who keeps a wretched menagerie in her apartment:

Her five horrid, deformed little dogs, who

incessantly yap on the roof under
my window;
her cats, god knows how many, who must

piss on her rugs—her landing’s a
sickening reek… .

If you’re not squeamish, Williams makes you want to be squeamish. Soon that poor old woman is not just mad, she’s Medea. Williams’s gift, if it is a gift, is to turn the most loathsome observations against himself: the ravaged presence of this woman is shadowed by memories of a lover he’d once been cruel to—as if, in some Borgesian reality, they might be the same woman. They’re not, and he knows they’re not, but at the center of his disgust is a kind of erotic longing. His own sins are the first to be written.

Unfortunately, Williams also has other designs upon the reader. He loves the extra gush of significance that places his poems high in the annals of bathos: “the true history I inhabit, its sea of suffering, its wave to which I am froth, scum” or “Quickly, never mind death, never mind mute, oblivious, onrushing time: wake, hold me!” or “the leaves quake, and Oh, I throw myself this way, the trees say, then that way, I tremble,/ I moan, and still you don’t understand the absence I’ll be in the void of unredeemable time.”

Such lines confirm your worst fears—that the poet is a little too aroused by his own nakedness. Many of these poems are anatomy lessons (you feel Williams would like to buy a textbook and take out his own appendix). The poet watches himself, watches those around him (in a way that must be excruciating to those around him), watches the poems that will never relieve him of responsibility for what he observes. Here and there, in “Hawk” and “Insight” and “The Lover,” Williams achieves a passionate despair that rivals Edwin Arlington Robinson’s lesson in neurotic psychology, “Eros Turannos.”

… at first she thinks it’s just coincidence;

after all, she knows she’s
sometimes wrong,
everyone is sometimes wrong, but with him

now all there seem to be are
sides, she’s always wrong;
even when she doesn’t know she’s arguing,

when she doesn’t care, he finds
her wrong,
in herself it seems she’s wrong, she feels she

should apologize, to someone,
anyone, to him;
him, him, him; what is it that he wants from

her: remorse, contrition,
should she just die?

The rising panic is precisely pitched on the rhyming of wrongs. At such moments the poet’s loss of shame becomes a perfected form of guilt. Far too many poems, however, are like watching a dog eat its own vomit.

Williams must hope, vainly, that watching can change things, even when he knows that nothing can change (why else would he be so attracted to transformation, to poets like Ovid and Rilke?). If things could change, we would not have to die. Williams’s poetry seeks absolution, and confession must always come before absolution. You leave his poems, as you leave most rituals, feeling more soiled than ever.

The death of Joseph Brodsky last January invited the usual pieties for an unusual public career. Brodsky had been adopted by this country with old-fashioned warmth, the way it adopted Nureyev and Baryshnikov and would have adopted Solzhenitysn, had he not retreated into isolation in Vermont. Brodsky, forcibly exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972 (therefore passing most of his adult life in America), was a rakish, engaging, impish character—the Byronic gestures were not always unconscious—and it was hard to see beyond that character to the poetry. The poems were obscured not just by the difficulties of translation.

Brodsky was fortunate in his translators, at least until he took the major role himself (if a lawyer who hires himself has a fool for a client, a poet who translates himself has a fool for a translator). Earlier translators gave his work English sense and style, at the cost of making him sound like Wilbur if the translator were Wilbur, Hecht if the translator were Hecht (many American poets would like to be translated into the English of Wilbur or Hecht). It was not clear, however, how much of this Russo-Wilbur or Russo-Hecht was Brodsky.

Most of the poems in So Forth[5] were written in English or translated into English by the author, and reading their wayward, tone-deaf lines makes you admire Nabokov and Conrad. Languages may be acquired late, but foreign words are first learned in equal weight or measure—it takes years to absorb the nuance necessary for literary composition. Nabokov and Conrad are test cases of English acquisition (as Beckett might be the parallel case for French); but Conrad didn’t write poetry, while Nabokov’s Pale Fire and his translation of Eugene Onegin merely prove how difficult English poetry is for a foreign ear (Nabokov was a genius in English prose, a minor workman at English poetry). Brodsky wrote English prose with rapacious appetite and fluency, but his poetry often sounds like verse by Humbert Humbert. You hear, as if through a lath-and-plaster wall, a noble, muffled intelligence. In his essay “To Please a Shadow,” Brodsky claimed he wrote in English only to get closer to Auden, and some of his poems sound like Auden read through a pair of tin cans connected by string.

What are we to think when a poet as gifted as Brodsky, a Nobel laureate, writes “one keeps carving notches only/ so long as nobody apes one” or “the tear could be mine, chin-bound” or “The eye tracks the sinking soap, though it’s the foam that’s famous”? Or “The battle looks from afar like—‘aaagh’ carved in stone” and “seven/ years later and pints of semen/ under the bridge” and “a cross between muscular torso and horse’s ibid” and “O if the transparent things in their blue garret/ could hold their eye-dodging matter in second gear”? The words are generally right, but all their music is wrong. When a foreign poet writes as if his fingers were in casts, you blame the translators—and Brodsky wasn’t always his own translator. He worked with another translator to produce this:

Twilight in the new life. Cicadas that don’t

relent.
A classicist perspective that lacks a tank or,
barring that, dank fog patches to obfuscate

its end;
a bare parquet floor that never sustained

a tango.
In the new life, no one begs the moment,

“Stay!”
Brought to a standstill, it quickly succumbs

to dotage.
And your features, on top of that, are glazed

enough anyway
for scratching their matte side with “Hi” and

attaching the postage.

This sounds like Edith Sitwell on a good day or Ashbery on a bad one. Writing in English, Brodsky succumbed to:

“Right,” says the Emperor. “Our enemy

is powerful, mean, and brash.
But we’ll administer him such an enema

his toilet won’t need a flush.

Rhyme was a method of organization disastrous to Brodsky’s style, yet he used it like an addict. English is resistant enough to a foreign tongue, likely to pronounce all sorts of unlikely words as if they were rhymes; but Brodsky could torture his syntax for a rhyme perfectly awful, and even rhymes Cole Porter would have loved (Noah/spermatozoa) don’t have lines to make them lovely.

When we read poems that go wrong in so many ways (almost always the ways of the ear), we’re reminded how much we know about our language without knowing it. A native speaker would never write, I hope, “However you hide the ace,/ the table gets hit with jacks of some odd suit and tailor” or “the world changes so fast, as if/ indeed at a certain point it began to mainline/some muck obtained from a swarthy alien” (probably not a man from Mars). Brodsky wasn’t always this bad. “Nativity” opens,

No matter what went on around them; no

matter
what message the snowstorm was straining

to utter;
or how crowded they thought that wooden

affair;
or that there was nothing for them

anywhere… .

“Utter” and “affair” are off-key, but the simplicity of this is otherwise its salvation. Or consider this Audenesque quatrain:

Birds acquaint themselves with leaves.
Hired hands roll up their sleeves.
In a brick malodorous dorm
boys awake awash in sperm.

Brodsky’s career in English was a career of might-have-beens. He plainly wanted to stake his claim in two languages (his essays may be his lasting achievement in English), but his pride could not accept his limitations, while mere ambition could not overcome the absence of what a native speaker absorbs through his pores. We read foreign poetry not for its music—for what is lost in translation—but for its angle of vision and strangeness of attack, for an architecture foreign to us, not imprisoned in the conventions of English verse (which for most poets mean the practices of their contemporaries). These autumnal poems of death and decay, turning often to elegy, show beneath the dead matter of translation that freshening of the foreign. But the poems themselves are now an elegy for great ambition.

Anthony Hecht’s new book, Flight Among the Tombs,[6] opens with a collaboration with Leonard Baskin, whose nearly two-dozen engravings of Death are densely inked nightmares of skeletal figure, a Who’s Who of cadaverous posture and macabre costume. Hecht’s elegant and dryly witty commentaries look beyond the grave by looking at the grave. He must have jumped at the chance to caption such illustrations, the poems have such a show-offy, self-satisfied air, an air a little at odds with their subject. Hecht has always been a brooding, melancholy character (sometimes the melancholy has been purchased wholesale), and the pitiless glances of his work have been a stern reminder of a world of violence and holocaust beneath the sweet inconsequentiality of our poetry.

Death abides in life, poets are forever reminding us—we live already swaddled in our burial clothes. Here is “Death the Oxford Don”:

Sole heir to a distinguished laureate,
I serve as guardian to his grand estate,
And grudgingly admit the unwashed herds
To the ten-point mausoleum of his words.
Acquiring over years the appetite
And feeding habits of a parasite,
I live off the cold corpus of fine print,
Habited with black robes and heart of flint,
The word made flesh for me and me alone.
I gnaw and gnaw the satisfactory bone.

No poet since Pope has written of scholars with more disdain, and Hecht revels in the ironies of his own long life as a scholar (what would humor be without a little self-loathing?). Hecht takes the measure of engravers, too; but Death appears in so many guises (poet, painter, carnival barker, judge, Punchinello), the sequence has the festive spirit of a Dance of Death.

There are gorgeously rendered passages throughout this sequence, and two or three poems of fatal, moving eloquence. The longest, “Death the Whore,” is an unsparing portrait (like Hecht’s haunting poem “The Deodand”) of the depravity of the sexual gaze—only Hecht could suffuse Victoria’s Secret catalogues with the smoke of a crematorium. Hecht’s strength as a poet, apart from his easy knowing meter (full of little trysts and elopements), has been this willingness to take the modern on its own terms, to embrace the detritus of popular culture as if it too had secrets to reveal.

The sequence otherwise is disappointingly workmanlike—the verse is professional, artfully crafted, all the sawdust swept out of view, but it is the disinterested labor of a man paid for a job of work. At times Hecht hasn’t taken advantage of the subject: “Death the Film Director” might have reminded us how devoted photography has been to death (in the cinema, to the scapegoat death of actors), how all photographs are in the end portraits of the dead. Instead we get shallow ridicule of Hollywood. The worst poems end with cheesy puns or clichés (“Death Riding into Town” compares Death to Clint Eastwood and ends, “Go ahead, make my day!”).

The dozen or so poems in the remainder of the book are reminders of Hecht’s graces: reworkings of Meleager and Horace; a villanelle; elegies for James Merrill and Joseph Brodsky (so fulsome it might have been written by one of those state poets Brodsky despised); a clutch of poems on classical themes, smelling at times of mildew (“Yet she is wed, in heaven or hell’s despite,/ To an ignoble, titled troglodyte”). One of these, however, is a devastating picture of a Latin class, with all the pathos of the boys’ halting mistranslations and the teacher’s undeciphered homoerotic longing.

“Thompson,” he’d murmur, “please instruct

our class.”
And Thompson would venture, timidly, much

rattled,
“Caesar did withhold his men from battle,
And he did have enough in presentness

To prohibit the enemy from further

wastings,
From foraging and rapines.” And through
a long
Winter campaign of floundering, grief,

and wrong,
That little army force-marched without resting.

“That little army” is the class, and you’re reminded that many armies have been made of boys not much older. The stumbling, desperate, hopeless march toward learning is nearly heartbreaking (if this were Greek class, you’d wait—in vain!—for them to get to the mountaintop with Xenophon and shout Thalassa! Thalassa!), and you can tell Hecht delights in all he implies about classes, and teachers, and learning. “Proust on Skates” doesn’t come to much, but it opens with one of those passages that begs to be quoted:

The alpine forests, like huddled throngs

of mourners,
Black, hooded, silent, resign themselves

to wait
As long as may be required;
A low pneumonia mist covers the glaciers,
Spruces are bathed in a cold sweat, the late
Sun has long since expired… .

Flight Among the Tombs contains little of Hecht’s best work, his acidic lines on human nature (nature nature, too), his astringent, moral colloquy with history. But in a long and magnificent career he’s written dozens of poems I’ve nearly read the ink off of, have taught and quoted with pleasure, among them “Third Avenue in Sunlight,” “Behold the Lilies of the Field,” “The Dover Bitch,” “‘More Light! More Light!,’” “‘It Out-Herods Herod. Pray You, Avoid It,’” “The Cost,” “An Autumnal,” “The Ghost in the Martini,” “The Deodand,” “An Overview,” “Persistences,” “The Book of Yolek.” Very few poets have ever handled English words with such devotion, and Hecht has written with extraordinary passion (always dry, dry passion—like a martini mixed with the memory of vermouth) into late age. We have had no better poet of war to honor these decades of peace, or what we have chosen to call peace.

Notes
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1. Walking the Black Cat, by Charles Simic; Harcourt Brace, 83 pages, $24. Go back to the text.
2. Brink Road, by A. R. Ammons; W. W. Norton, 230 pages, $23. Go back to the text.
3. Sun Under Wood, by Robert Hass; Ecco Press, 77 pages, $22. Go back to the text.
4. The Vigil, by C. K. Williams; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 78 pages, $18. Go back to the text.
5. So Forth, by Joseph Brodsky; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 132 pages, $18. Go back to the text.
6. Flight Among the Tombs, by Anthony Hecht; Knopf, 76 pages, $23. Go back to the text.