“Entre deux mots, il faut choisir le moindre,”

Valéry once counselled. Prodigally, Eric Ormsby has spurned that advice, electing in many instances to use the ten-dollar word where the bargain one might do. For a Modest God, his first book published in the U.S. (two earlier, Canadian volumes are sampled in it), rings with an opulence of phrasing too rarely heard in our poetry. Ormsby’s deluxe style is sure to offend those who equate polysyllables with pompousness and full-throated melody with atavism. But for the antique rest of us, his poems afford the rare pleasure of listening to a polished yet deeply humane sensibility respond, in language of exhilarating verve, to whatever it seizes on or despairs of.

Take, for instance, this passage from “Gazing at Waves”:  

The spectacle is sovereign, yet intimate.
How soon the waters enter our
attention, follow us in sleep,
accompany the cadence of our minds,
seem punctual and seriatim, curled
in all the beauty of futility,
so promptly mortal as they gather in,
ascend and hover in the gusting air,
then amble over into hiddenness,
fold themselves in sand like drowsy claws
curved into the twilight of the nest.

“Sovereign, yet intimate” characterizes Ormsby’s tone here and throughout. Despite their pedigreed diction, his poems never strut, condescend, or lapse into mandarin whims and obliquities. Quite the opposite: Ormsby always tries to shadow, like the waves, “the cadence of our minds.” In this case, his parataxis and gently lapping rhythms mimic not only the ocean but the ruminative drift its sounds touch off in us.

Turning to another poem, “Rooster,” we find this chirpier bit of parrotry:

I like the way the rooster lifts his feet,
so jauntily exact,
then droops one springy yellow claw aloft
just like a tailor gathering up a pleat;
and then there are those small, surprising lilts,
both rollicking and staid,
that grace his bishop’s gait,
like a waltzer on a pair of supple stilts
or a Russian on parade.

Ormsby has scrutinized his fowl, found a series of droll, charming similes for it, and then—trickiest of all—caught its gait in the quick, frisky, almost nursery-rhyme movement of these lines, so different from the meditative swells and recessions quoted above. Elsewhere, flamingos are observed to have a “billiarding/ adolescent sprawl of knees” and “the silhouettes/ of parking meters,” crows a “snug yarmulke,” anhingas “a calisthenic finesse.” Ormsby works his comic anthropomorphoses further down the food chain, too. About an ant lion’s post-prandial etiquette, he notes, “There’s a proprietary fussiness,/ meticulous, almost suburban, as/ the little killer scrapes his whirlpool smooth.” To my taste, his animal poems are among the most delightful since Marianne Moore’s.

No less discerning is Ormsby’s botanical attention:

The random meanders of the blind wood lice
cut their labyrinthine cicatrice
of cryptic squiggles in soft cambium.

Their carved grooves look like staves and

notes of scores
a cello ellipsoidally transmutes
before the main theme flitters to the flutes.
I feel these clear canals. My fingers parse

these worm trails laid bare like epigraphy.

Ormsby is a professor of Near Eastern Studies at McGill University, and it’s hard not to read into lines like these a Muslim reverence for script. His whole manner of embellishment, in fact, often seems to me faintly analogous to the rippling traceries of Arabic. However hoary the metaphor of nature as an open book, Ormsby makes it work, so graceful is his handling of the trope.

One of Ormsby’s most amusing gambits is to turn his microscope—and the tables with it—on his own species. He’s written a series of “body part” poems, two of them found here. First, “Fingernails,” which begins, “It is the patrimony of reptiles, or of birds,/ to possess such pale claws, to sport such/ little flashes of keratin at the farthest tip.” As will have become apparent by now, Ormsby is obsessed with claws. Also noses:

The nose is antithetical. It sniffs,
snuffles, wallows in sneezes, then recoils
in Roman nobility, profile-proud;
pampers its fleshy shadow in bas-
reliefs; or is serenely alcoved within
rotundas where the chiseled light
dapples its expansive flanges.

Who (except perhaps Rostand) knew that noses lead such vain, complex, separate lives? Once again, I hail Ormsby’s deft manipulation of sound and all it connotes, as witness the razor-fine shift, at the end of the second line, from lowliness to hauteur; with “then recoils,” the poem mock-snootily hoists its beak into the Augustan air.

That Ormsby dotes on apparently unpromising objects such as lice trails, slag chunks, and his nose invites the critic to apply that treacliest, most prevalent of clichés: “the extraordinary found in the ordinary,” some breathless version of which accounts for at least half the blurbs these days. But on closer inspection, his work points up just how unsatisfactory this platitude really is. For while his poems may cause us to gaze with enhanced awe at, say, our nostrils or a wood fungus, what counts—what, if anything, might be called “extraordinary”—is the nacre he secretes around the thing, the thing itself being no more than a sort of tailor’s dummy. On some level, a bathetic relation obtains in many lyrics, and a poem like “Nose” only emphasizes the fact.

Another term one often hears bruited about lately is ecphrasis. Ormsby’s memorable contribution to the genre is “Finding a Portrait of the Rugby Colonists, My Ancestors Among Them,” which refers to a utopian community founded in Tennessee in 1881. The poem concludes:

Tell me, if you had been
the God who shaped their cheekbones
and their brows, the dignified alertness
of their ears, their ceremonial and
formal smiles, their throats the patience of a
May sun mottled with its little daubs of

luminance,
the fingers curved on Bibles or on canes,
the feet in their black-thronged propriety
of dainty boots or strenuous clodhoppers,
would you, for a world,
have let them tumble into
nothingness and seen their strong hearts rot,
or would you have raised them up again,
the way you rouse a sleeper or a child?

This is grand and stirring poetry. Among other things, it reminds us how much momentum and authority a well-wrought sentence can accumulate. Ormsby’s syntax here feels nearly sculptural: he carves a sinuous groove down the page—a mold innocent of language, waiting for words but shapely in its own right—and then fills it with locutions of mixed fragility and force, like “dainty boots or strenuous clodhoppers.” Emotionally, meanwhile, he strikes a tightrope balance between the curatorial and the passionate; the result is a rich, historical pathos that stops short of sentimentality.

Just as affecting are the familiar poems of Ormsby’s adult life. “Blood,” dedicated to his adopted sons, includes these lines:

Blood relies
hysterically on old school ties

while our enlacements all have been made
thread by thread, braid upon braid.

And “History,” presumably about his ex-wife, stands out for its apt austerity:

This is our history.
The place is empty now where we began.
The rooms are full of sunlight, and the sea
effaces all the traces where we ran.

But when Ormsby glances back at his childhood, his focus can go soft and misty. “Rain in Childhood,” “The Gossip of the Fire,” and “Fragrances,” to name three culprits, are too sweetly Proustian, marred by a cloying nostalgia:

And sometimes I would hide in her

wardrobe,
standing among the dresses and the gowns
as though a rush of women circled me
with a smell of warm and fragrant skin… .

I have a few other disgruntlements to air, the pettiest being with Ormsby’s defiantly middling titles. A stiffer charge is that he sometimes gilds his lichens, as it were. Having defended Ormsby’s flourishes generally, I must also admit thinking that he falls at moments into a euphuism compounded of inkhorn vocabulary and excess alliteration. In particular, his poems can reek of early Stevens: “mute communicados,” “cadaverous vermeils,” and “blazon Venezuelas of lewd suavity” register as fulsome, overripe pastiches.

On the whole, however, Ormsby carries Stevens’s mantle with rightness, ease, and Brummellian flair. The master’s curlicues, minute textures, blend of boisterousness and dignity, and, above all, his ear for the inner harmonies of English: these have been passed on. Ormsby could justly adopt, for his own puffery, the boast he lends to the tenth-century Arabic poet Mutanabbi: “language flows/ from my fingertips and from my quill/ the way the spider tesselates its silk.” But amour-propre isn’t his tendency. Rather, he resembles

… a poet who
discovers a covert love affair between
obstreperous syllables and then,
cracking grandeur from the egg of shame,
sets these
diametric desperadoes in a pas de deux.

We don’t use language—it uses us. As Karl Kraus once said, in the days when one could safely breathe such things, “My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.” Ormsby’s linguistic ambition is less jealous: magnanimously to sponsor—like a Frenchman, or an easygoing god—torrid liaisons, and then to eavesdrop on them. Between two words, you must play the humble Cyrano.

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