(4 of 6)
The diving bell of your head
descends.
In this, her first book-length collection, Marge Piercy proves that modern poetry can be both passionate and perceptive, well-structured and inventive.
COMING CLOSE by Helen Chasm. 54 pages. Yale. $4.50.
In this latest volume in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Helen Chasin demonstrates that she is a poet not only of promise but of some achievement. She can tease the word plum until the reader can almost taste it. Witnessing Harvard Square's hippies, she can gently puncture their posturings. Her passion is often tempered with irony, particularly in speaking about love:
Once I said always; once is enough, God knows, to establish relevance.
She can be imaginative but tough, as when she sees the sexual connection between love and junk in "Addiction."
Daddy, the concern
in your expressed hope
that I'm not on the stuff's
extremely touching.
Would it be too much to guess your guess:
Who turned me on? what junkie pressed his packet, fixed me in his need until I moan for his sweet sake? You liar, love's a racket, at best only a connection.
There may be youthful uncertainties in her work, but most often her talent allows her to gamble and gambol.
THE RESIDUAL YEARS by William Everson. 238 pages. New Directions. $6.50.
This collection includes all of the poems written between 1934 and 1948 by William Everson, before he became the Dominican monk Brother Antoninus, under which name he now writes. Brother Antoninus writes about the book: "Its roots go back to the earth of the San Joaquin Valley, the substratum of my life, back to a happy marriage, inexorable incarceration in the Waldport Camp [a conscientious objector's prison], painful divorce, hopeful remarriage, and abrupt, disturbing separation—back to my love of nature and of woman, to a poetry of physical celebration and tortured sensuality; back, in a word to the 'residual years'..."
His work is hammered out of the acute awareness of self. But. while it can be accused at times of self-dramatization, his vision is harsh and realistic, and his lines have a driving force, as in "The Stranger."
Pity this girl.
At callow sixteen,
Glib in the press of rapt companions,
She bruits her smatter,
Her bed-lore brag.
She prattles the lip-learned, light-love
list.
In the new itch and squirm of sex, How can she foresee?
BENDING THE BOW by Robert Duncan. 137 pages. New Directions. $5.
For Robert Duncan, a member of the Black Mountain school, the poem is a universe in itself, and a soul. With his consciousness of poetry's epic and mythic nature, it is no wonder that Duncan's efforts to collect so much of living, thought and feeling into the world of one poem should be quite like Ezra Pound's Cantos and William Carlos Williams' Paterson. His concern, therefore, is most often with the poem itself, as in "Bending the Bow."
We've our business to attend Day's
duties, bend back the bow in dreams as we
may
till the end rimes in the taut string with the sending. . . .