(2 of 5)
And nonsense soft with truth—
A reader who expects these poems "to evoke in him the flattering sensation of understanding more than he knows" will soon be dashed. But a reader who approaches these poems as literal communications may at length understand them. Readers, says Laura Riding, are accustomed to the kind of poetry written in what she calls "a tradition of male monologue." Laura Riding's poems are no monologues: they are direct communications of personal knowledge from herself to the reader. These poems make such unfaltering sense that most readers' attention will falter before them.
THE MAP OF PLACES
The map of places passes.
The reality of paper tears.
Land and water where they are
Are only where they were
When words read "here" and "here"
Before ships happened there.
Now on naked names feet stand,
No geographies in the hand,
And paper reads anciently,
And ships at sea
Turn round and round
All is known, all is found.
Death meets itself everywhere.
Holes in maps look through to nowhere.
By such signs and tokens, this book, for an English-speaking person marooned in the middle of the 20th Century, would be the book of books for him to have along.
Robinson Jeffers, California's unofficial laureate, this month published his Selected Poetry (Random House, $3.50). In its foreword he stated his poetic creed. He declared that "poetry must concern itself with (relatively) permanent things." His work at its best does give an impression of the emptiness of the American continent, an emptiness which the continent fills with (relatively) permanent things like forests, mountains, rivers and 130 million people, and which Jeffers, for the most part, fills with mythological personages, semi-scientific platitudes, nonpoetical intensities, and—for the pay-off—mental exhaustion.
The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly . . .
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
Because his words are impersonally grandiose instead of personally grand, Robinson Jeffers, who in another place and another time might have been a prophet, is here & now a vasty poetaster.
Situated on a ridge of rock that rises above the Passaic, N. J. meadows is the suburban town of Rutherford. Rising above the dead level of contemporary U. S. poetry is William Carlos Williams, one of the town's busiest doctors. A worshiper of beauty and music in a town that is short on both, he jots down poems in any free moment that his medical practice affords. Last month appeared his Complete Collected Poems (New Directions, $3). Unlike the run of poets, Williams does not use his poetry as an escape from his cramped environment, but as a code in which to express its unregarded beauties.
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens