At seventy-nine Richard Wilbur has survived most of the poets in the generation before him and some in the generation after. The new poems in Mayflies[1] often seem like things written forty years ago and put in long-term storage, but they could never be mistaken for the baroque, over-mannered manner of his early work. Wilbur was once master of the filigree, the apparently extraneous and precious detail, the verbal undercarving that can look like magic in a period of carving and as fussy and dust-catching as Grinling Gibbons for a long while thereafter.

That moment of high formal style after the Second World War, of early Lowell, Wilbur, and Merrill, might be due for a revival when meter again becomes a language taught to the young, not got second-hand by the middle-aged. The promises of New Formalism look threadbare twenty years after the school opened its doors, but most of its poets had to acquire formal knowledge the hard way, long after their ears had been hardened by free verse.

The danger of a style more courtly than a courtier, civil with obedience, is that the poet may forget why he was writing in the first place—style becomes his raison d’être. Writers who survive the elegance of their style (Shakespeare, for example) are usually making a point: when style declines into a silver age, poets compete with each other in simile contests. Their constraints become conventions. The best of Wilbur’s early poems had an edge to the fussiness: the beauty measured not just an ideal world, but the ruins of a world the imagination had lost. Poems like “First Snow in Alsace” and “‘A World without Objects Is a Sensible Emptiness’” were gorgeous in their surfaces, and in quarrels deeper than surface: the snowfall of words covered the wreckage of war.

Wilbur had great gifts he didn’t squander so much as stop using, at least for his poetry. He became our premier translator of Molière and Racine, but whether he abandoned poetry or poetry abandoned him has never been clear. He has continued to write, doing little more than toying with his verse, the way a great cat toys with prey. The poems, now simpler and less distractingly ornate, don’t seem to matter much to him, and it’s hard to see how they can matter much to the reader, even at their best.

Crow’s Nests

That lofty stand of trees beyond the field,
Which in the storms of summer stood

revealed

As a great fleet of galleons bound our way
Across a moiled expanse of tossing hay,

Full-rigged and swift, and to the topmost sail
Taking their fill and pleasure of the gale,

Now, in this leafless time, are ships no more,
Though it would not be hard to take them for

A roadstead full of naked mast and spar
In which we see now where the crow’s nests are.

Frost’s wry homilies underlie this less homiletic observation (Wilbur wrote recently that he’s “always in danger, even now, of succumbing to Robert Frost”); and yet how handsomely turned it is: the forests that once provided masts for tall ships stand like ghostly shadows of vanished fleets. With Wilbur’s poems you wait for the cunning twist; here the pun that binds present and past recalls the reason a ship’s lookout, the kind Ishmael envied on a Greenland whaler, was called a crow’s nest. Wilbur can still bestir himself for his endings (his rhetoric dies in full plumage like a suicidal ballerina), but too many of the new poems don’t remember at the end why they began. Slightly worn and depressive, they’re edged with a melancholy that set in during the Eisenhower administration.

The new translations are deft, accomplished, sometimes irresistible (I was disappointed that the stunning version of Baudelaire’s “The Albatross” had been lying around since 1955). If his prologue to Molière’s Amphitryon manages to be erotic and stuffy (like a lecture on sex, in Latin), you sense Wilbur’s relief at not being responsible for his subjects—the best translators may be those satisfied to stage the thoughts of other men. Wilbur’s chief weapon as a translator, apart from his rueful elegance, is his limitless command of rhyme. He has an unsure sense of the colloquial, however, so when Dante is made to say (in a translation of Inferno XXV), “so tightly that they could not stir one jot” just before “Alas, Pistoia, why dost thou not ordain … ?,” it’s hard to know whether we’re in the reign of Elizabeth II or Elizabeth I. (John Ashbery is only half-a-dozen years younger than Wilbur, yet they sound as if they were born centuries apart.)

What Wilbur discovered in style soon lost interest for him, as happens when a style fails to challenge its maker (you have to leave a few snakes in the garden, just to liven things up). As he got older, Frost got worse, but he never gave up. When you read Richard Wilbur’s new poems, you think, “This is what Frost would sound like if he had given up.”

Thom Gunn is an old man with a taste for young flesh, as he reports with glinty honesty throughout Boss Cupid[2] (the handsome skinhead on the jacket, dressed in Levi’s and Doc Martens, looks ready to stomp a man like Gunn at the first opportunity—perhaps that’s the point). At seventy, Gunn has begun to look back with a vengeance. The opening and closing sections are cast mainly in that glorious, now musty formal style of the Fifties, a style Gunn once savagely rejected. If this is the revenant’s return, there’s a fitting classical symmetry to it.

The Makers did not make
The muddy winter hardening to privation,
Or cholera in the keep, or frost’s long ache

Afflicting every mortal nation
From lord to villagers in their fading dyes

—Those who like oxen strained

On stony clearings of the ground

From church to sties.

Those sties have all the firm rhetorical clinch of the period, with the astringent whiff of the church’s birth in a stinking straw-filled manger. It has taken Gunn fifty years to turn back into a Movement poet like Donald Davie, and it sounds as if that’s where he belongs, in a style stirred with second thoughts, seduced by the architecture of rhyme.

The language isn’t always so adequate to Gunn’s life in between, and the strain shows in his muscular sexuality. If Rochester and Swift could find in their iambics a scabrous and sexual tongue, why can’t Gunn? His poems too often have a stilted deliberateness that makes their descents rudely comic:

He lost the wrestler with the smile
Who pinned him to the mat of love for ever.

Or, even more mortifyingly:

If only I could do whatever he did,
With him or as a part of him, if I
Could creep into his armpit like a fly,
Or like a crab cling to his golden crotch.

Time changes not desire but the meaning of desire. The young can love the young all they want, but when a grand old man wants a sweet young thing all hell breaks loose. Gunn seems aware how sex-obsessed and wearying his talk can be (if this is the stuff he says to his readers, what does he whisper to lovers?), yet secretly he lives for the swagger: “he wore/ one of those net shirts/ so his nipples poked/ through two of the holes … ./ I could have killed/ for a chance to chew/ on those jumbo tits.” Is there a double standard that allows gay men to lust after the young in a way unacceptable for men who lust after girls?

If these new poems are all about love, it is conditioned by the fin de siècle specter of AIDS, whose devastations lie grimly in the bedrooms and hospital sickbeds here. Gunn knows the frenzied bathhouse life of the Seventies and Eighties was a breeding ground for the disease, yet he longs for those days of drugs and “Dionysian experiment.” Time has taken its toll—when thinking about using speed now, he mentions his high blood pressure.

An old man with the “greed for youth” recognizes that the young want to be fed upon. He makes few apologies (Gunn’s attempts to be with-it put the vamp back in vampire), though the obsession with flesh is weirdly refracted through poems on the serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer. Either Gunn doesn’t see the connection, or he’s making crass play with it. In poems on serial killers, sympathy is short-circuited by disgust.

I don’t want to remember Gunn as just a gay poet, though the more his recent poems have been praised the more he’s written as one. His strongest work hasn’t required sexual preference. The formal poems here suffer from their cautiousness (as if they’d set out to discover exactly what they’d discovered, and nothing more), while the free verse lacks authority, the lines failing to provide enough resistance to work against. In the vision of a beautiful GI, in an elegy for a young man not his lover, there are moments of regret and surrendered beauty the poems scarcely explore. Gunn uses with perfect selfishness the hustlers and homeless who service him—in this book of love, the love is coarse, heartless, and as mechanical as an instruction manual. He’s unrepentant, not unreflective but all too willing to reflect, as if being an artist made a rough virtue of rough trade.

The oddity of Anne Carson’s poems conceals every virtue except their originality and exposes every flaw except their contempt. Men in the Off Hours[3] is far from her strongest book, yet it has the fatal attraction of being more provocative, more irritating, and more gleefully obscure than most poetry in the off-hours of our prosaic age. Carson mixes the classic and contemporary with jaunty bravado, showering the reader with prose as if spraying him with a fire hose: she thinks nothing of lugging in classical allusions that would have given T. S. Eliot heartburn.

A professor at McGill, Carson is a classicist with avant-garde longings. It’s easy to forget that many ancient authors broke the rules—only time has hardened the classics into classics. Her poems have a fierce, indrawn mystery that lives off the fragments of lost empire, like papyrus dredged from the sands of Oxyrhynchus:

Epitaph: Zion

Murderous little world once our objects had

gazes. Our lives

Were fragile, the wind

Could dash them away. Here lies the refugee

breather

Who drank a bowl of elsewhere.

This quatrain hangs from the fishhook of that once, which might mean “at one time” instead of “after.” The jammed syntax, so brutely ambivalent (reminding us that manuscripts were once written without punctuation—you were supposed to know how the sentences fell, and if you didn’t you weren’t Greek, you weren’t Roman), lies uncomfortably against the windy blather of that “bowl of elsewhere.”

Carson is a great believer in blather: her poems are full of brittle ironies, temperature-taking feminism, a bossy sententiousness that isn’t the fault of the classics so much as a common misuse of them. Her “confessions” by characters in Edward Hopper paintings (or perhaps the voices of the paintings themselves) hardly need to be spoken, the paintings are so vulnerable in their emptiness—and if spoken, don’t need to be brutely banal (“Is/ it/ light/ from/ the/ street streaming in unshaded/ or/ a/ wind/ of/ autumn that pierces our bones?”). Tags from St. Augustine’s Confessions can’t weigh them into significance.

You have to wade through a lot of ideas to get to Carson’s best work. The ideas are often more interesting than the poems (she doesn’t have many natural poetic gifts, and sometimes seems to have no gifts at all); when they’re not, the reader might be forgiven for thinking ideas a bad thing altogether. Ideas may keep a reader company when a poem is awful, but most readers would rather read a good poem than a good idea for a poem.

Men in the Off Hours begins with a twisty little essay on Thucydides and Virginia Woolf (it’s like beginning a party with a lecture on sanitation); later Thucydides reappears in the sequence “TV Men,” directing Woolf in a documentary on the Peloponnesian War. It’s a sweetly daffy premise, but in the end it tells us little about Woolf and less about Thucydides. (The essay on “female pollution” that ends the book is more suggestive, if typically donnish and hectoring.) Have the classics fallen so far they need to be racy? Catullus’s short poem on his lover’s pet swallow isn’t rescued by being butchered into mock perversion.

On her lap one of the matted terriers.
She was combing around its genitals.
It grinned I grinned back.
It’s the one she calls Little Bottle after Deng

Xiaoping.

Deng Xiaoping? Yet Carson’s recklessness is appealing when many poets live on Social Security long before retirement. When she’s condescending to Freud or Audubon, when she juggles nouns and verbs like a guerrilla lexicographer (“use the hum/ of your wound/ and flamepit out everything,” “keep Praguing the eye”), when she puts Lazarus on television or casts herself as Catherine Deneuve, you hardly know whether to laugh or cry. But then she’ll write a passage that uses the damages of prose as a kind of poetry:

Bandaged head to foot in pieces of diagonal

cloth,
Lazarus flickers
between two heavily veiled people like a bit

of kindling
or a stalk
of something white and dry stuck in the

ground.
His eyes
have the power of the other world. Barely

open,
narrow shock slits
whose gaze is directed—simply, nowhere.

In this book such moments are too few. Carson is more architecture than art—you see the scaffolding for poems, yet you rarely see any poems, just a jumble of building materials. The means are so much the ends, perhaps you don’t need ends anymore; though that’s a morally self-satisfied point for a poet to make—it’s as if she felt blueprints for poetry were better than poems. Carson is the sort of poet who wants to start a revolution but ends up giving civics lectures.

Tiepolo’s Hound[4] is Derek Walcott’s big chance to smuggle his paintings into print. They illustrate the glossy text of this long poem, and the best that can be said of them, in all their art-lesson amateurishness, is that they’re much less charming than Elizabeth Bishop’s and much less gifted than Edward Lear’s. Walcott’s paintings are earnest enough, but they’re the work of a paint-by-numbers man. Many poets have longed to master arts other than poetry; the crispness of the visual, its fidelity to the inner courses of the eye (poets who wish to be painters generally want to be realists), offers in painting something like truth against all the rough, deflected falsities of language.

Walcott has always been a painterly poet, his lines smeared with the oil of image, thickly impastoed as if he’d bought tubes from Winsor & Newton and squeezed them onto the page. On an early trip to New York, he was haunted by a painting in the Metropolitan, a Renaissance feast where a dog lurked beneath the table, “a slash of pink on the inner thigh.” Tiepolo’s Hound entwines the lives of two Caribbean émigrés—the Impressionist Camille Pissarro, who left St. Thomas for the bohemian life of Paris, and Walcott, for whom the half-remembered image promises redemption for life abandoned in St. Lucia. The method, old as Plutarch’s double-entry bookkeeping, is consciously flattering to the poet.

The guilt of the émigré is, for Walcott, bound to responsibilities of race and colonial culture. If you flee to the capitals of empire, haven’t you betrayed your identity? Pissarro, the Sephardic Jew raised in a backwater Danish colony, is an elusive model for a poet born exactly a century later.

They stroll on Sundays down Dronningens

Street,
passing the bank and the small island shops
quiet as drawings, keeping from the heat
through Danish arches until the street stops

at the blue, gusting harbour, where like

commas
in a shop ledger gulls tick the lined waves.

Sea-light on the cod barrels writes: St

Thomas,
the salt breeze brings the sound of Mission

slaves

chanting deliverance from all their sins
in tidal couplets of lament and answer.

The tics of Walcott’s style are on brilliant display: the rocking of loose pentameter (looser elsewhere than here), the formality of lines cast as couplets but rhymed as quatrains (the feminine rhymes like commas/ St. Thomas often cheerful but awful), the nervous reminder of writing, the images burnished with effects of light and movement (that shop ledger finely judged against Pissarro’s indenture as a clerk), and those “drawings” that unfortunately never let us forget this is art about art.

Walcott is too eager to turn the life of Pissarro, a sometimes middle-class bohemian, into a morality play on the exclusion of the Other. Laboring through the snubs visited on the upstart painters by the Salon, I longed for a potboiler like Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy. The only thing worse than reading about a painter painting is reading about a painter not painting— you might at least be repaid in melodrama.

An artist’s divided loyalties to career and country require more implication and less cant (in case you were wondering, colony =good and empire=bad), but Walcott sleepwalks through his poem, daubing at images like a Sunday painter. The action halts every few inches for another gaudy evocation of St. Thomas streets, Caribbean flora, French landscape, while the poem stalls like a still life and dies the slow death that poems do. Walcott is a rich and indelible writer, lost here in the musing of his talent, writing a picture book without any pictures but his own. It’s not giving much away to reveal he never finds Tiepolo’s hound and isn’t even sure the painting was by Tiepolo.

It’s bad enough that Walcott’s absent-minded descriptions stutter in repetition (birds figure as arrows again and again), full of teeth-grinding Wordsworthian meditation, blowsy cameos by History and Memory, jokey puns (“Jewdas,” “Veron-easy”), grammatical slips (“any one of the/ two names”). It’s bad enough Walcott has cynically invented Pissarro’s homesickness for St. Thomas. Pissarro had been Paris-educated; he wasn’t the provincial galoot of Walcott’s fantasy, wandering the city doubtful and excluded and alone. After his schooling he had had to spend five miserable years back in St. Thomas and when he reached Paris again he wasn’t alone—he lived there with his mother, his sister, her children, an uncle, cousins. He never returned to the island again.

It’s all bad enough, but the poetry, despite its glut of glorious images, is sometimes worse.

The blow of their rejection was a dull
ache that sat like an anvil on his heart,

all he had made in joy, thought beautiful,
in their directness was indifferent art,

the pavement pictures of an islander
struggling with every stroke to realise

a life not his, work whose earnest candour
retained a primal charm to expert eyes.

Like an anvil. This milks the sentimental significance like Sir Arthur Sullivan in search of a lost chord. By the time Walcott claimed that Gauguin died for our sins I was ready to convert.

Jorie Graham’s Swarm,[5] which sounds like a bad movie about killer bees, is a pocket Inferno of poetic sins. Most of these poems haven’t been consigned to hell—they’ve chosen to live there. The poet of Erosion and The End of Beauty now puts little of her intelligence into her work (little of her intelligence and less of her logic), the words hurled scrappily onto the page, the poetic line fussed with until it lies tangled like yarn. This wouldn’t matter if the poems survived the gnomic density of their creation (no one cares about the means if the ends are good poetry), but too often the vanities of imagination produce nothing more than this:

Explain two are

Explain not one

(in theory) (and in practice)

blurry, my love, like a right quotation,

wanting so to sink back down,

you washing me in soil now, my shoulders

dust, my rippling dust,

Look I’ll scrub the dirt listen.

Up here how will I

(not) hold you.

Single lines become stanzas, as if to slow their breathless urgency to a crawl. In their gauzy preoccupation with metaphysics, the lines forget themselves, the antiphonal parentheses interrupting with second thoughts and hesitant reversals of meaning. Browning adored the simulacra of doubt and equivocation; Graham’s poems often seem monologues of a metaphysical personality disorder, every perception analyzed in Freudian duration for its false starts. The icy beauty is matched only by the tedious vacancy.

Some of these techniques have long been in the armory of the avant-garde, and Graham has seen their advantage to a poetry trying to mimic perception (always, always, in the slowest of motion) or to wrestle with sullen philosophies of knowledge and belief. She has become a poet of process, of the fine featherings of instinct, her poems a visual splatter not as comic as Cummings but stealing the short-tempered dramas of typography. In the tension of lines broken against themselves, the words are sometimes reduced to those poetry magnets people stick on fridges: “Explaintongue breaksthin firein eyes.” You sense here the Bible’s “cloven tongues like as of fire,” but it is suggestion without substance.

Nearly half the poems in Swarm are disordered sections of an ur-poem called “Underneath,” which “negotiates passionately with those powers human beings feel themselves to be ‘underneath’: God, matter, law, custom, the force of love”—that’s the jacket’s idea (poets often have to write flap copy these days, and when libraries toss the dust jackets they lose the most naked and self-publicizing version of the poet’s intentions). Poems vaguely address a lover, invoke Lear and Agamemnon, but they manage to sound serious without doing more than gesturing importunately. The problem is not that these poems are puzzling, troubled, sibylline—it’s that they’re all these and pretentious as well.

Exhale (in years)

*

The shadows live

*

Fleshless lovers

*

The tabernacle of

*

(fleshless lovers)

*

(with no lifetimes laid hard on them)

This poetry of dreamy portentousness is more dispiriting than anything Graham has written. No layers of intellectual substrata can rescue lines that offer so little in their surfaces. Hints of Christian faith and trust (the lines like messages rapped from the hulls of sunken submarines, like scraps from Dead Sea scrolls) ought to give the poems weight and substance, but the sentence fragments, missing words, vacuous pauses, and other detritus of style have made Graham ever more absent in her presence, ever more likely to fall victim to lines assured in their pretensions: “I speak now for the sand,” “the acid slippers of eternity being tried on each new foot,” “War then tidying-up then war. (I see),” and, with smiling obscurity, “Distance leaks.” As in Swinburne, the dangers of style outweigh the advantages.

Graham imagines herself a visionary (poets writing this badly almost always have high-minded reasons)—otherwise it would be difficult to explain the self-drama, the absence of humor (humor would make her vulnerable), the way the poems gassily expand to fill available space. There’s a rare glimmer of the lyric poet she once was (“where the raven suddenly wetly and rawly/ roughens the low vacillations of various windsweeping/ hushings”), but Graham has lost her sense of embarrassment and humility. Reading her hither-thither intellectualizing, I remembered Gloria Swanson’s lines in Sunset Boulevard—“I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” In these numbed, overemphatic, philosophic poems, every gesture will be stared at, though it means almost nothing. Dante planned no better punishment for ambition.

The watercolor lucency and smoky depths of Linda Gregg’s poems remind me of Roethke, whose work is still obscured by the cloud of unknowing that follows death. (Death is the review from which many reputations never recover.) Things and Flesh[6] is a title crudely Aristotelian in its categories, but if Gregg were Greek she’d be a stoic who had once been a hedonist. It’s easy to prefer philosophers who live their philosophy rather than talk about it, easier still those who keep their philosophy secret, as if it were shameful as sex or private as religion. Gregg’s poems are compact, self-consciously mysterious, living on the masochism of lost love and remembered pain, of shadowy forces that govern behavior and belief.

More than New

One of the men begins to sing. The woman
turns from side to side, flouncing her skirt
and stomping. The men play their guitars.
He begins to sing again. She stamps harder
but it is not big enough. The man sings
so hard it breaks the song and becomes

wailing.
The woman is proud. The men are proud.
Everybody is proud. And it is still not
strong enough. The gods are relaxed,

pleased,
but justice is unmoved. Says, “Show me

something.
Don’t mess with me. Show me something I

can believe.”

These prose statements have little poetic about them: only the line breaks keep this from becoming a legal deposition. The incantation of pride is comic, almost joky, but then the poem shifts register. The gods may be appeased by musical offering, but justice is not. Justice wants, not to be believed in, but something to believe (you could say readers want that, too). It’s just a crude scene with a strange torsion to the ending, an ending that suggests that behind what we see are angry principles, unassuaged.

Gregg is hypnotized by what Jarrell called the “dailiness” of life (her poems glow like Cézanne apples). She has stripped life away to essentials, or life has stripped her to essentials; and the poems are a haunted meditation on what is left—a few people cooking, a man slipping a safety pin into his skin, tea in a Muslim graveyard. Often the poems start with bitter, agitated lines (“There is a flower. We call it God,” “All things we see are the shapes death makes”) that sound like Emily Dickinson when she’s off her medication. They lie there as if the poet had to write them, as if they were written from anangke, the Greek necessity— most poems sound as if a poet had written them for tenure.

Etiology

Cruelty made me. Cruelty and the sweet

smelling earth,
and the wet scent of bay. The heave in the

rumps
of horses galloping. Heaven forbid that my

body not
perish with the rest. I have smelled the rotten

wood
after rain and watched maggots writhe on
dead animals. I have lifted the dead owl

while it
was still warm. Heaven forbid that I should

be saved.

Gregg believes, like a philosopher, that actions have meanings, and she’s unsparing if self-dramatic in her analysis. The other contemporary lost in a similar world of myth and tension, of the black mist of psychology, is Louise Glück. Their differences are instructive—they’re both fiercely proud and merciless in their intelligence, but Glück sounds like a victim, Gregg like a sphinx who has just eaten three travelers for breakfast.

The sour intensity of Gregg’s poems is an acquired taste, and her failings make it tempting to dismiss her. The poems are repetitive in mood and manner (grindingly so), the poet preening in her discontents, the gloomy tone so unrelieved you think the author is beyond, not simple pleasures, but simple enjoyment of pleasure. Boiling everything away to banalities, the poems give the trivial unbearable significance. Gregg has been flayed toward sacredness (she doesn’t ask to be liked, and that makes you like her). After the weary irony of so much contemporary poetry, written by victims who aren’t victims, it’s a relief to read poems whose mysteries are deep in what they must say.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. Mayflies, by Richard Wilbur; Harcourt, Inc., 80 pages, $22. Go back to the text.
2. Boss Cupid, by Thom Gunn; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 113 pages, $22. Go back to the text.
3. Men in the Off Hours, by Anne Carson; Alfred A. Knopf, 168 pages, $24. Go back to the text.
4. Tiepolo’s Hound, by Derek Walcott; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 164 pages, $30. Go back to the text.
5. Swarm, by Jorie Graham; Ecco Press, 115 pages, $23. Go back to the text.
6. Things and Flesh, by Linda Gregg; Graywolf Press, 81 pages, $14. Go back to the text.