POETRY
The scrupulous and artistic use of language is one of the things that distinguishes humans from the rest of creation. Three new books show us human nature at its most reflective and imaginative, its most primal and urbane.
. . .
Although Canadian literary dynamo Margaret Atwood is best known for her novels, she has also written many fine poems. Atwood has always had a sharp eye for and a lush ambivalence about experience, but the first section of her 13th book of poems, %26quot;The Door%26quot; (128 pages, Houghton-Mifflin, $25), is made up of surprisingly slack pieces of easy nostalgia.
Has the poet lost her ability to render the complexity and strangeness of the familiar? No. %26quot;The Door%26quot; gets better fast. Sections II-V are packed with memorable, intelligent work. Atwood writes especially well about poetry, and her new book sometimes turns the light of poetry on itself with splendid results.
%26quot;The Door%26quot; is, on the whole, witty, thoughtful, closely observed. And it comes with a CD of poems read by Atwood herself.
. . .
Kenneth Koch’s posthumous %26quot;On the Edge: Collected Long Poems%26quot; (432 pages, Knopf, $35) is a companion volume to his massive %26quot;Collected Poems%26quot; and slathers six long works over 432 pages. Koch’s verse always seems to be enjoying itself; this is one of its signal attractions.
Too often, though, it’s enjoying itself at the expense of the reader. The long poems in %26quot;On the Edge%26quot; appeared at intervals over 3%26frac12; decades, and they allow the expansive Koch to demonstrate his playfulness to the point of self-indulgence and flat-out silliness.
Like Byron at his most satiric, Koch likes to scatter flippant rhymes and facetious clich%26eacute;s in all directions. But, unlike Byron, Koch gives us high spirits without high intentions, childlike glee without controlling adult irony. Or he gives us irony without focus, which finally means irony without significance.
Koch was a master of a kind of triumphant trivialism. His biggest fans point to his love of parody, but parody at its best is aesthetic criticism, and pointless parody gets old fast.
Still, these long poems offer the usual Koch linguistic abundance and verbal inventiveness. Sentence variety? Here are some examples chosen more or less at random. Imperative: %26quot;Wear the Sistine granges!%26quot; Declarative: %26quot;The horizon’s always rounder near the Equator.%26quot; Interrogative: %26quot;What about Bird Africa? what about Luck Africa? / Angel Africa? Eat Africa? and Sunk Africa?%26quot; Exclamatory: %26quot;O arms and legs!%26quot;
When you’re in the mood for Koch, he can be a delight. But what, you may ask, was this man writing about? Well, language, excitement, energy, pleasure, and the comic features of seriousness.
. . .
Mark Strand, on the other hand, is a very serious poet. Like his younger contemporary Louise Gl?ck, he has made his name as a poet of absences. Where Koch sprawls, Strand withdraws. Where Koch is fireworks and racket, Strand is shadow and silence.
Written in the middle of the 20th century and bucking the rich, imagistic tide of the era, his most famous poem is chilled with the void of abstraction:
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
(first stanza, %26quot;Keeping Things Whole%26quot;)
Strand’s %26quot;New Selected Poems%26quot; (288 pages, Knopf, $26.95) gathers work from 11 books published over 43 years. The language is simple, though the sensibility is anything but. As the poet says of his own work, %26quot;There is a sullen, golden greed in my denials.%26quot; And there are remarkable moments of melancholy humor: %26quot;It is easier for a needle to pass through a camel / Than for a poor man to enter a woman of means.%26quot;
. . .
These books bear witness to poetry’s unique status as the most primitive yet sophisticated of the literary genres.
Oh, and these books can make excellent gifts.
ambivalence,amp,new books,Novel,strangeness
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