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At other times, Duncan escapes from the esoteric game playing of his cross-referencing of word and image, forgets to be the Delphic oracle, and finds a poem that reaches outside of itself to the real world of experience. In "My Mother Would Be a Falconress," the relationship between mother and child is placed on a chilling medieval level that includes a touch of Freudian contest:
My mother would be a falconress,
And I, her gay falcon treading her wrist,
would fly to bring back
from the blue of the sky to her, bleeding, a prize,
where I dream in my little hood with many bells
jangling when I'd turn my head.
THE BACK COUNTRY by Gary Snyder. 128 pages. New Directions. $4.25.
A member of the San Francisco school, Gary Snyder writes primarily from his modern Western background and the influences of his journey to the Far East. This new collection contains four sections: those poems written before 1956, when he was working as a logger and forest ranger; those composed between 1956 and 1964 in Japan, where he studied Zen; those influenced by his visit to India; and those completed on his return to the U.S. In all, the mark is of the imagist poet concentrating on the pure intensity of the picture.
The structure of each poem is determined by the fragmented highlights of what is apprehended, as in "What Do They Say."
The glimpse of a once-loved face
gone into a train.
Lost in a new town, no one knows the
name.
lone man sitting in the park Chanced on by a friend of thirty years before, what do they say.
Play chess with bottle caps.
"for sale" sign standing in the field:
dearest, dearest, Soot on the sill,
a garden full of weeds.
The impressions are drawn together out of the subconscious and the memory to collide with the fresh sensations of the present. The logic must be pieced together from the wreckage. In recording this poetic traffic accident, what must be remembered is that it's not the speed that kills, it's the impact.
INCARNATIONS: POEMS, 1966-1968 by Robert Penn Warren. 64 pages. Random House. $4.
The old magician is back again, bringing new poems written since his Selected Poems: New and Old, 1923-1966. A major craftsman in poetry as well as fiction, Warren demonstrates in his latest book that age has not diminished the passion he brings to his witnessing of life. The fierceness of nature is here placed side by side with the violence of urban life and the physical frailty of man. A convict in a cell doubles over in pain in "Keep that Morphine Moving, Cap." Death arrives in a cheap motel. A woman is struck by an automobile. All of it is told with a combination of elegant line and colloquial speech that makes each moment vivid and real beyond the pretensions of poetic form.
Oh, in the pen, oh, in the pen, The cans, they have no doors,
therefore I saw him, head bent in that
primordial
Prayer, head grizzled, and the sweat, To the gray cement, dropped. It
dripped,
And each drop glittered as it fell, For in the pen, oh, in the pen, The cans, they have no doors.
CABLES TO THE ACE by Thomas Merton. 60 pages. New Directions. $3.75.