The dreamy, sotto voce poems of Book of My Nights[1] might lure babies to sleep, or butterflies. They’re “simple,” “lyrical,” “honest” —their graces come with little scare quotes attached, not because Li-Young Lee is ironic but because it’s so difficult to believe such sweetness isn’t ironic. A willed naïveté may be no worse than real naïveté, yet innocence isn’t always better than experience. The Babes in the Wood were long ago eaten by bears.

Li-Young, don’t feel lonely
when you look up
into great night and find
yourself the far face peering
hugely out from between
a star and a star. All that space
the nighthawk plunges through,
homing, all that distance beyond embrace,
what is it but your own infinity.

It’s hard to imagine a poet more romantic in these unromantic times, but being romantic isn’t simply a matter of slipping on a Byronic collar and striking a pose. Lee’s language derives not directly from Shelley or Keats, but from the slow degradation of romantic diction through the Georgians down to the trivial byways of sixties surrealism. Lee takes W. S. Merwin’s animist idiom (almost forensic in its study of stones and bones) and pushes it a lot farther (shoves it over a cliff, on occasion). All he’s added are punctuation marks.

The Romantics poured the acid of the personal over the studied impersonal forms of Augustan poetry (you know a real crippled Pope wrote his profoundly frivolous poems, but they sound as if they were cranked out by a mill wheel). The cool detachment of the Augustans seemed old-fashioned when readers found themselves aroused by the intimacy and privacies of romantic speech. It was the difference between listening to a Sunday sermon—and Pope was the wittiest of preachers—and taking a lover. Wordsworth’s “real language of men” has been reborn each generation, and as one diction hardens there has usually been a young Romantic ready with a seductive whisper.

The problem with young Romantics is that sometimes they are themselves seduced by what they’ve read—they don’t want to write a language lived but one long antique, one that worked for earlier Romantics. When Lee moves his counters across the page—night and moon, sleep and the stars, the woman, the dead brother—you don’t think you’ve been spoken to by the trembling voice of wisdom. You think you’ve been stranded in the middle of The Castle of Otranto or The Mysteries of Udolpho.

My eternity shrugs and yawns:
Let the stars knit and fold
inside their numbered rooms. When night asks
who I am I answer, Your own, and am not lonely.

After such passages (with the grandiosity of a molehill, not a mountain), you need a whiff of smelling salts. There are more poems about God here than in Lee’s earlier books, but his real religion requires an airless myth of family—almost no one appears in these poems except blood relations, and they’re the vague figures of a psychiatrist’s couch, reeking of ancient grief and anger. It’s part of that drawing-room claustrophobia that Lee’s favorite device is the rhetorical question (“And what’s it like?/ Is it a door, and good-bye on either side?/ A window, and eternity on either side?”). When a poet has seventy-five of them in a short book, he’s left a lot of questions unanswered.

Some readers will find Lee’s hand-me-down feelings (secondhand language always denatures the emotions it carries) as honest as paint; and at times the clean, well-mannered lines carry a suggestive image like the “missing pages/ of the sea” or the “jasmine, its captive fragrance/ rid at last of burial clothes.” More often he falls into the moony silliness of a “woman// like a sown ledge of wheat” and the “well/ from which paired hands set out, happy/ to undress a terrifying and abundant yes” (Lee has my nomination for the stuffed-owl anthology of the new century). The beautiful mush of these poems is hard to take. Sentiment slathered on so thickly is always hard to take.

Now the Green Blade Rises[2] is the ominous title of Elizabeth Spires’s new book. You see the point, in these poems written after her mother’s death (fresh shoots of grass growing from the grave); but the other sense of blade, rising only to fall, delayed like the sword of Damocles, lies in grim suspension behind the hope of resurrection. Whitman’s point, the Bible’s point, was that blades of grass soon fall as well.

The quiet confidence of Spires’s poems has not received much attention—she’s not one of the loud middlebrow poets of her generation, poets who become poet laureate or run a great foundation. Sometimes a poet has to get to middle age before people realize how much better she is than the poets around her.

We were talking about doctors when I saw the blowfish,
green as the greenest apple, puffed-up and bobbing in the shallows.
But when I looked again, it was only a pair of bathing trunks,
ballooning out, aimlessly knocked back and forth by the tide.
Ahead, the cruise ships lay at anchor in the harbor.
At noon they’d slip away, like days we couldn’t hold onto,
dropping over the blurred blue horizon to other ports of call.
The hotels we were passing all looked out to water,
a thousand beach chairs in the sand looked out to water,
but no one sat there early in the morning. And no one
slept in the empty hammock at the Governor’s House
where workmen in grey coveralls raked the seaweed into piles,
until the sand was white and smooth, like paper not yet written on.

The ghost in the style is Elizabeth Bishop, whose sprightly “Arrival at Santos” has been darkened until the echoes become part of the tide’s erasures. The lines extend slightly past the condensation of poetry, until their leisure, their prosaic view, no longer conceals the mortality within. Spires enjoys a distracted kind of poem-making—she notices things, then other things, notices (with curious dispassion) even the emotion in herself. She uses trivial domestic incidents, letting them deepen almost carelessly, past suggestion into meaning: many poets start with the dross and chaff, but most end there, too.

Spires is best at the blunted edge of pain, the shiver of regret or whisper of longing—all her memories prepare for loss. (Some of her poems read as if she’d waited for inspiration, but the inspiration never came). The good poems look less like achievements than accidents—the poems on her mother’s death leave me cold (a harsh thing for even a critic to say), yet the parents and lovers and children of worse poets die all the time without the reader shedding a tear. If you saw the obituaries you might be touched; but life, however tragic, becomes art only when the poet provides something beyond the banality of circumstance.

Spires’s modest, untemperamental character is ill-suited to strong feeling. Her poems are rarely cruel or moving—she’s too eager to be mild (sometimes too eager to be mawkish, too); yet, when her poems recognize the feelings averted or avoided, the recognitions betray the sins of generations:

You’ve left an envelope. Inside, your black pearl earrings
and a note: Your grandmother’s. Good. In ink the color of mourning.

I remember the songs you used to sing. Blue morning glories on the vine.
An owl in the tree of heaven. All of my childhood’s sacred mornings.

Your mother before you. Her mother before her. I, before my daughter.
It’s simple, I hear you explain. We are all daughters in mourning.

I was your namesake, a firstborn Elizabeth entering
the world on a May morning. I cannot go back to that morning.

The ghazal is such an overused and now cheapened form, it’s shocking to read one so tender.

Few of Spires’s best poems are driven by necessity. This can be an agreeable quality, when so many poets look like blowfish and turn out to be bathing trunks. Yet it’s one thing to borrow the manners of prose, another to let a prose laxness spoil the writing. (A poet who employs a literary diction shouldn’t be guilty of so many split infinitives or phrases like “each in our own … way” and “who was walking who.”) The overuse of rhetorical questions (she’s another addict), the faux naiveté (which worked for Bishop, but has worked for few others since), the bland phrases like “hot heat” and “white as snow”—sometimes it’s hard to tell simplicity from mere cliché. Perhaps it’s the more remarkable that with limited means Spires reaches such pressures of feeling (she’s like a diver plunging a thousand feet into the sea with only a fishbowl over her head). In eight or ten of the poems here, she makes the demands of myth—the moment when the daughter Persephone becomes a Demeter—look like a moral responsibility.

Mark Doty loves to tug at the heart strings—some of the poems in Source[3] have chamber quartets swelling behind them (others have whole symphony orchestras). He’s a poet with a gift for description, a taste for winsome subjects, an addiction to images of light (less now than in earlier books), and a narcissism all his own.

Doty’s new poems were written under the gentle influence of Walt Whitman, not his style but his broad, generous character. After Whitman, however, do we need a poet who looks at everything with awe, who has epiphanies in gym showers (“men, all girths and degrees of furred// and smooth, firm and softened, fish-belly/ to warm rose to midnight’s dimmest spaces/ between stars”) and writes elegies for dead bunnies? If you hug every tree on the lot, if you love everything you see (Doty could make a garbage can a thing of beauty), isn’t it hard to tell one thing from another? You’re just the sum of your gimcrack, greeting-card sentimentalities.

Doty’s giddy immersion in humanity sometimes sounds like a pep talk for American business, like things Stephen Vincent Benet wrote in the thirties. “We drove,” Doty writes,

to Fred Meyer, a sort of omnistore,
for saline solution, gym shorts, a rake.
In the big store’s warmth and open embrace
who could I think of but you? We were

Americans there—working, corporate,
bikers, fancy wives, Hispanic ladies
with seriously loaded shopping carts,
one deftly accessorized crossdresser,

Indian kids in the ruins of their inheritance,
loading up on Easter candy, all of us standing,
khakis to jeans, in the bond of our common needs.

Our common needs! If you want to torture some spy, read him passages like that and you’ll have his state secrets in no time. Poems that grind away in trivia eventually become trivial—banner emotions and a booster’s good intentions aren’t enough. Doty loves to make poems from the trash that is the world (though when you rub the reader’s nose in trash, you start a course in aversion therapy): if such poems were prose, they’d look like this:

Marie read poems, and Michael—in a thrift-store retro ensemble that meant I want a boyfriend—made his literary debut. Someone played the spoons. Davíd, who’d said our town averaged that year a funeral a week, did a performance piece about the unreliability of language. Someone showed slides: family snapshots tinted the colors of a bruise.

The only thing worse than seeing someone’s snapshots is being told about them. Doty’s eyes-raised worship of the human is conducted with sickening hushed solemnity (“Here is some halo/ the living made together”); but is it enough to change Whitman’s “Every one that sleeps is beautiful” to “Every one who shops is/ also lovely”? Is that all Whitman’s vision has led to?

Doty’s so busy preening, he falls victim to hilarious verbal blunders. What’s the poor reader to make of “how each dog’s any,// every lemon-scaled/ fandango in the restaurant tank/ the perfect incarnation// of carp?” (You see something’s wrong and realize he means something like how each dog is the same as any dog, but not before you’ve seen those poor mutts thrashing among the fish.) What of “lusters preserved/ by the taxidermist’s wax, or the case/ in which he perched”?

Doty should be more than a glam poet who can write passages of hypnotic, alien beauty (“jellyfish/ of a horrifying red, escaped Victorian curtains/ trailing ferocious tatters,// whips and fringes pulsing freely,/ electrically—lion’s manes, they’re called”). Too often he renders a world not transformed, just lacquered and varnished with a FOR SALE sign attached. If you hired him to design your house, it would end up looking like Versailles on a quarter acre, with gushing baroque fountains (concrete, not marble) and interiors by Liberace. Such cheap profusion, such indulgent excess, is close to cloying vanity. You get a hint of Doty’s deeper wounds, of compromised fragility and sad vulnerability, then he lights up his lines like Las Vegas and tries to sell you tickets to the floor show.

I have nothing against the sublime, as far as I know. Americans, democrats that we are, believe the sublime can inhabit almost anything—Yosemite and yard sales, ruins and rotisseries, fallen oaks and fallen women. The wish for the sublime infects even the suburbs full of Emersonian independents. (The suburbs were the Arcadia built for the city to escape to, but where can the suburbs escape to? The farm?) The more we look at a land ravaged in its beliefs and soiled in its aspirations, the more we might hope for an ideal elsewhere—transcendence is an American dream, and we have a lot to wish to transcend.

B. H. Fairchild’s Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest[4] is a pendant to The Art of the Lathe (1998), praised for its sentimental account of working life—his father’s machine shop figured as the chief moral example. The new book returns again and again to the shop and the paternal lathe (his father threaded broken drill-pipe until high-speed diamond bits changed the oil industry), a world he writes of with absorbing affection and insulating nostalgia:

They are gathered there, as I recall, in the descending light
of Kansas autumn—the welder, the machinist, the foreman,
the apprentice—with their homemade dinners
in brown sacks lying before them on the broken rotary table.
The shop lights have not yet come on. The sun ruffling
the horizon of wheat fields lifts their gigantic shadows
up over the lathes that stand momentarily still and immense.

They really made machinists and apprentices in those days. You see where the sentiments are tending (those brown sacks, those homemade dinners!), even before the men rise up like giants—but in Greek myth the giants had to be slain for us to inherit the world we have.

There’s nothing wrong with making noble figures of factory workers—Stalin thought it a fine thing, and the good communist boilermakers who flexed their biceps in socialist realist painting were little different from the muscled coal-mining democrats in the post-office murals of the WPA. Long ago the Romantics had their shepherds, and before them Milton his shepherds, and before him Virgil and Theocritus their shepherds. There’s nothing wrong with romanticizing the working man, except it’s usually the work of a deskbound poet whose nearest brush with hard labor comes, these days, from what he sees in the movies.

There’s nothing wrong with it, but does the lice-ridden shepherd or the coal miner dying from black lung ever feel quite so noble? I’m reminded of a poet who on the basis of a few long-ago weeks sweeping factory floors became the laureate of the factory floor. Even when Fairchild touches on the grinding boredom of nine-to-five jobs, there remains a varnish of romance—condescension disguised as apotheosis. Soon the poet’s gaze, because he is a poet, turns instead to chokecherries that “gouge the purpled sky” or a sun that “dissolves behind the pearl-gray strands/ of a cirrus and the frayed, flaming branches/ along the creek”—gorgeous scenes, but like a lurid landscape by Bierstadt hanging behind a scrap pile.

Fairchild describes his machines as animals, and when they’re not lunging or shuddering they’re sobbing (the magic seems as penny-ante as Circe’s). Auden was in love with machines, but the machines were fixed in a social and economic landscape—and besides, Auden was a genius. (You can’t expect your reader to suffer from lathe envy very long.) To make the industrial sublime more than just a coat of oil and some cheap tears, you’d have to treat nostalgia with more disrespect. Fairchild loves the half-forgotten commerce and kitsch of the past—“decoder rings,/ submarines powered by baking soda,” the Muriel cigar box, the Pontiac Chieftain, small businesses with names like Roman’s Salvage and Beacon Hardware. It’s like staring too long at a ragged poster for Moxie or Flit. The new romanticism has a sentimental attachment to the past simply because it is past—it believes the ordinary is significant because it is ordinary. The homely details are supposed to be redolent, like a morning madeleine, of time passed and misfortune embraced. Sic transit gloria Moxie.

Out back in the welding shop where men were gods, Vulcans in black helmets, and the blaze of cutting torches hurled onto the ceiling the gigantic shadows you watched as a child, place here the things of gods and children: baseball; a twilight double-header and the blue bowl of the sky as the lights came on; the fragrance of mown grass in the outfield; the story about the great pitcher, Moses Yellow Horse; your first double play at second base.

In the long prose-poem that closes the book, the machine shop becomes a version of Matteo Ricci’s memory palace. Fairchild can write blank verse more fluent and supple than many of his peers (whose verse looks as if it had been turned on a lathe and then beaten with a ballpeen hammer); but even his prose wanders, like a prodigal son, miserably back to that shop. The poems have the sensibility of country-western lyrics, a mixture of orneriness and self-pity, free-style bulldogging and the trashy perfume of sentiment; though in the end the lives are no better than stereotypes. When Fairchild writes a strange uncompromising poem about the Crucifixion, you see what he might be, stripped of his obsessions. He’s too busy now with his Vulcan machinists and smalltown hopes—when he writes of roustabouts “like Ascension angels” or baseball players who embody the “old dream, of men becoming gods/ or at the very least, as they remove/ their wings, being recognized as men,” it’s hard to keep a straight face.

A lot of foreigners have visited America and made it their business to tell us our business. We may never see our country the way others see it, yet without de Tocqueville or Mrs. Trollope or Dickens we’d know less about its manners and moods, its liberties and limitations. Sometimes we learn what we should have known all along, sometimes what we’d never have suspected. The foreigner is not just an innocent who sees freshly what we’ve grown stale to; he sees with different prejudices, not blind to what blinds us. When crowds gather to burn copies of Domestic Manners of the Americans or Martin Chuzzlewit, a nerve has been touched.

Glyn Maxwell’s poems in The Nerve[5] do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay (sometimes you wish they were a little dishonest). He came to America as a graduate student and still sees it as a foreigner, with the eyes of an Englishman but the limestone common sense of Robert Frost.

Nothing but snow about. A hunting man
set out from his own truck and his sleeping son,

who followed him, found no one, and was found
five days later frozen to the ground.

His father had been nothing but a fool.
He went about his chores, he went to school

for nothing, and he waited in his truck.
The days were featureless and the nights black

he drove into. He hunted in that place,
he camped there in the trees, he heard the ice

shifting in the branches. “Not the best,”
his sister told a lady from the press,

“the thing he did.”

Nothing but a fool. The pronouns are shyly confusing, but the poem has Frost’s dark appreciation of accident, of the difficulty of atonement. And what a beautifully pitched, terrible thing the sister says! Maxwell reminds us how much our poetry has lost with the decline of its moral function—we’re all jaded habitués now, comfortable when people confess the most shocking things (and bored silly by most things they confess).

Maxwell is hardly a flashy poet. (His early work was wicked in an Audenesque way, without Auden’s demonic language or perverse views.) If you read too fast, you miss his subtlety, his artful measure of speech. He’s a poet you have to read twice, yet he almost never uses a striking word—similes and metaphors are so rare he must shop for them at Neiman-Marcus. But in the judgments delivered and the morals drawn (such judgments are about having character), he reveals more of himself than poets who tell all. Though one or two poems look back toward the country he abandoned, a choice has been made and a bargain struck—he’s writing about home now, a home by choice.

I made my child a promise, so a weight
was passed to her. I saw how carefully

its power was handled, that it lit the thoughts
around it, and I felt it warm her talk

and urge the hours along. Since I, like you,
no longer know a word like that, the light

she gained was lost to me. It didn’t mean
I’d let her down—I didn’t—but I seemed

to be aligned with those who might in time,
as if I’d somehow set coordinates.

The simplicity makes it seem simple, but Maxwell knows how to tell stories without making the reader impatient. Sometimes he slaps together a tedious poem from the tedium of life (what could be greater drudgery—in a poem—than a football game?); and his short poems are slight and whimsical, though he has a talent for song. But a poet capable of lines about a farm “selling its things to everyone whose plans/ had ground to a stop on the road that afternoon,” or lovers in love “till what they’d happened on// would seem to have been waiting” understands what Frost was getting at, and why Frost’s pentameter is American as a blue-plate special. To see an Englishman remake himself this way makes me uneasy; yet Frost’s Yankees were not far removed from the stubborn ancestors who left minor villages and towns across England, places like Boston and Plymouth and Manchester, men who in hope named their new homes Providence and New Haven and in memory New Jersey and New York.

So many British and Irish poets have settled here in the past twenty years you wonder who’s minding the shop back home. Having Glyn Maxwell, Eavan Boland, Geoffrey Hill, Paul Muldoon, and many another in this country would be, if only we knew how to take advantage of them, a provocation to our pretty concerns—but the losses to British and Irish poetry have been devastating.

Things happen in Paul Muldoon’s poems that don’t happen anywhere else—I’d call Moy Sand and Gravel[6] the Irish version of magic realism, if it didn’t imply that the local haylofts were infested with faeries and the bogs with leprechauns. This wearyingly gifted poet published his first book at twenty-one and has hardly stopped to breathe since—he’s the best joker in English poetry since W. H. Auden. He loves the sound of words and loves even better that by accident they have meanings, too:

To come out of the Olympic Cinema and be taken aback
by how, in the time it took a dolly to travel
along its little track
to the point where two movie stars’ heads
had come together smackety-smack
and their kiss filled the whole screen,

those two great towers directly across the road
at Moy Sand and Gravel
had already washed, at least once, what had flowed
or been dredged from the Blackwater’s bed
and were washing it again, load by load,
as if washing might make it clean.

Smackety-smack! The delight in lingo and jargon and dialect (and nonsense) throws words into violent juxtaposition (not Horace’s concordia discors, but Johnson’s discordia concors) and brings individual lines under great linguistic pressure. The cinema—that symbol of the modern, fantasy, Manifest Destiny, the outer world—faces the local gravel plant, slowly (or rapidly) gobbling up home ground for sale. The dolly is just a camera platform, a word tainted by children’s dolls, by old slang for women—Muldoon adores such contamination. And don’t those two great towers mimic the giant screen lovers? On one side of the street, Hollywood sexuality, the bright lights of elsewhere; on the other the slow grinding of day jobs and the sale of ancestry. Some sins, like Lady Macbeth’s, can’t be washed clean.

Muldoon’s giddiness reminds you of Auden, without ever being Audenesque (sometimes Muldoon pores over an Irish dialect dictionary the way Auden used to pore over the OED). Muldoon is always going too far, then turning around and smirking, as if to say, “I could go a great deal farther, then stand on my head and juggle pomegranates with my feet!” A reader can only shake his head and say quietly, “But you don’t need to show off, and besides it’s so much better when you don’t.”

Muldoon sets himself impossible labors and then exceeds them. (He’s a Hercules looking for chores ever more Herculean. One critic noticed that several of his long poems use the same ninety rhyme-sounds, in the same order—sometimes repeated in reverse order.) He can make a poem from his baby son, a local flood, Irish navvies, gangsters, the Chicago Black Sox, the Holocaust—all interspersed with what officials call signage (PLEASE EXAMINE YOUR CHANGE, NO TURN ON RED). He’ll write a poem where the first nine lines end with draw, each time with a different meaning. Or one where various words have been replaced by something (“the plowboy was something his something as I nibbled the lobe/ of her right ear”—not since Chuck Berry’s “My Ding-A-Ling-A-Ling” has a line so needed to have its mouth washed out with soap).

Some of these poems misfire, but Muldoon doesn’t care about failure. He’s too busy thinking up another showoff stunt, pulling a rabbit—no, a rabbet; no, a rebbe; no, a rebate—out of a hat. The jokes can be tiresome, because they lose sight of his serious themes: the violence in Ireland; the loss of heritage; the ways in which language secretly, sniggeringly, reveals us (Ad astra per triviis might be the family motto). His poems—manic, uneasy, full of themselves—are so odd you think no one could do them well; when Muldoon does them anyway, you think no one else should do them, ever again (Muldoon had to leave Ireland to get away from all the Muldoon imitators).

When he quiets down, he writes as if he understood emotions and had even felt one or two of them:

The paling posts we would tap into the ground with the flat of a spade
more than thirty years ago,
hammering them home then with a sledge
and stringing them with wire to keep our oats from Miller’s barley,

are maxed out, multilayered whitethorns, affording us a broader, deeper shade
than we ever decently hoped to know,
so far-fetched does it seem, so far-flung from the hedge
under which we now sit down to parley.

If this were Seamus Heaney, he’d make nature bear the burden of time passing, of age and the end of age, of changes wished for and unwished. Muldoon wants anything but what Heaney would—even if that means ignoring the feeling potent in the words (parley means more in a country where the violent sides must eventually sit down together). If Muldoon is to become a major poet, he’ll have to leave some of the mannerisms behind, not because he can’t juggle bowling pins and lawn chairs and chain saws (all at the same time), but because he can.

Notes
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1. Book of My Nights, by Li-Young Lee; BOA Editions, 70 pages, $21.95; $12.95 (paper). Go back to the text.
2. Now the Green Blade Rises, by Elizabeth Spires; W. W. Norton, 77 pages, $21.95. Go back to the text.
3. Source, by Mark Doty; HarperCollins, 76 pages, $22. Go back to the text.
4. Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest, by B. H. Fairchild; W. W. Norton, 125 pages, $22.95. Go back to the text.
5. The Nerve, by Glyn Maxwell; Houghton Mifflin, 58 pages, $22. Go back to the text.
6. Moy Sand and Gravel, by Paul Muldoon; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 107 pages, $22. Go back to the text.