David Castleman
Martin Gray, Modigliani, 918 Collinson
St 305, Victoria BC V8V4V5 Canada; Eskatasis Editions, Box 8474,
Main Postal Outlet, Victoria BC V8W3S1 Canada; ISBN 0-921215-77-0,
96pps $12.00.
"To see such use of colour
go back two centuries
to Titian's and to Rubens'
eternal portraiture
each woman a madonna
her radiance of flesh
as body enters time
abandons that of space."
In this quoted poem we discover a microcosm of
everything that is James Martin Gray poetically: he writes
beautifully and brilliantly albeit without any recognizable trace
of pliantly mewling academicness, and without any recognizable
trace of the selfaggrandizingly affected isolato. His poetic lines
are only an exceedingly exalted prosisness, perhaps, and from the
withinside they appear to clutch and bustle against their
meticulously self-imposed limits as if in a slow and obstinate
explosion. And once we have assimilated them they appear to grow
within our minds.
"At this time Modi wrote
in his sketching pad:
'I do not seek the real
neither the unreal
but rather the unconscious-
instinctive mysteries
within the human race.'
His attitude was drawn
from Bergson's view of man
who put his stress upon
those feelings lurking there
that inner depth of life
capacity to feel
creating conscience."
Of course all of these poems are ostensibly and
literally concerned with an examination into the life and
psychological resources of the famous painter and sculptor Amadeo
Modigliani who died of tubercular meningitis at age 35, having
achieved a suicide by alcoholism etc. The artist clearly fascinates
the biographical poet.
Constantly we are permitted the pleasure of an
intensity of music, resembling the tightly bound music of Stephen
Crane's poetry except that Mr Gray's music is older and wealthier
with implication, with allusion, and with an almost hidden array of
deceptively suggestive and very formal device. Very formal puns and
very formal possibilities are continually suggested almost
diffidently, almost with an exaggeration of diplomacy, and in such
instances his very serviceable device is through an apparently
contemporary orthographical casualness which is actually contrived
exactly. This is a delightful through-the-lookingglass effect,
appearing where it is not, as it is not.
"All things start with the skin
the surface of the body
the soul's smooth envelope
where finite infinite
meet in a single image
and the body is an icon
simple yet so complex
postponing entropy."
This is wonderful, exactly.
Parenthetically it should be mentioned that these
poems are all in trimeters, a potent basic form resembling whole
breaths (in-out in-out in-out) or whole steps (right-left
right-left right-left). Their lush certain music I doubt is wholly
ascribable to this trimetrical device, however, which explains only
their splendid cadence. If cadence were all in music, we would awe
before recordings of Pablo Casals doing Ravel's "Bolero", rather
than before recordings of his "Brandenburg Concerti".
This is a poetry fascinating beyond mere
excellence.
Martin Gray, Death of Villeneuve and Other
Poems , 918 Collinson ST 305, Victoria BC V8V4V5 Canada;
ISBN 0-921215-50-9, 99pps, npl.
Mr Gray's poetic resources inhabit a broad swath of
our human history and he prefers the poetic issue of these younger
years we live most nearly not because they chance to be fortunate
enough to contain himself. If he prefers inhabiting the atmospheres
achieved by Alfred Tennyson to those by Samuel Johnson, it is
because he prefers the essence of the one to the essence of the
other, and it is not merely because Alfred was younger than Samuel
by a round century and therefore closer in age to Martin.
There is an enjoyable absence of silliness in this
perspective.
"Untroubled troubling face carved from a mammoth
tusk
man's oldest image yet as seen within his look
the temper of his lips his heavy weight of jaw
as if time were reversed not we assessing him
but he appraising us amused at what he
saw—
such falsely complex men relying on so much
while he is master of all things that he sees
and everything he does.
I recognize in him someone come to terms
with all that makes a world as we now never
can.
He stands in unison with all the living earth
and yet I sense a lack, the challenge of his
glance
still is tentative of something still unsure:
if soul would know itself it must look into
soul."
(Earliest Known Portrait)
Always he abides within each individual line so
they become taut and tend to butt where they touch fore and aft. He
ignores the observer, mostly, and concerns himself with scrunching
those lines together, making them mean their words. His philosophy
is of a God of inadvertence, of inattention, a God indisposed and a
blank absolute: his God is not a god as evil as the sun, a god of
whim and cruelty, a God of screws.
Stanley Mason, A German Treasury;
Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universitat Salzburg,
A-5020 Salzburg, Austria; available from Edwin Mellen, 240 Portage
Rd, Lewiston NY 14092; ISBN 3-7052-0630-3, 138pps, npl.
"Without me, this I know, God cannot live a
trice.
If I should cease to be, he too must pay the
price."
And in a simple epigram is displayed a plenitude of
arrogance, and a revelation of our ultimate insignificance. Certain
psyches would arrogate the creation to themselves, and certain
psyches would arrogate the very existence of the Creator to
themselves. How cuddlingly cute the imposture.
Here are translations from the German language of
poems written by folks (ie, men) who chanced to be born between the
years 1100 and 1700 (as we reckon years, anyway), and Mr Mason has
carried them to English while retaining an antique flair and yet
without inflicting a pseudo-antique preciosity on them. His
indefatigable erudition has combed the shelves of our language for
appropriate archaisms and he has scattered these archaisms
carefully among the poems, as bric-a-brac.
"A haze upon the moving breeze,
Sheet lightning in the far-off skies,
Rain that hardly wets the trees,
A shot that briefly rings and dies;
An echo through a valley dark,
A storm that's but a passing gloom,
An arrow that has found its mark,
Ice inside a sultry tomb;
All these are known to be as fleeting
As careless glances' random meeting,
Yet trivial as they are at most,
Your life, O man, is even less
Than this half-grasped forgetfulness.
Nothing's all, and you—its ghost."
Ah, yes. Life is decidedly a half-grasped affair at best, and at
worst.
Mr Mason's ability, which is considerable, and his
taste, which is laudable, appears to prefer the purely lyrical and
the intellectually dangerous, two qualities which are usually
incompossible. That which is only frivolous and that which is
fantastically frivolous elicits from him a lesser pleasure and a
lesser duty and a lesser display of ability.
"And so goodnight, old friends of mine,
Faces that I cherish;
But that now my years decline
To the earth and perish,
All you friends who weep around,
Count it not a sorrow!
For look, the sun that now goes down
Will rise again tomorrow!"
By all that's holy, I detest an emptyheaded
optimism. And yet, in this example we can see that Mr Mason has
accepted the glove from a million other translators and has fared
conspicuously well. Despite his reliance on the melody he has
carried his burden into our English lingo, in this example.
Everything is sharp as if inscribed on marble, and
much vigor is here, patiently so. Zukunftsmusik? Blossomingly
so.
Karl Shapiro, Wild Card: Selected Poems, Early
& Late, University of Illinois Press, 1325 S Osk St,
Champaign IL 61820; ISBN 0-252-06689-8, 200pps, npl.
"And when Dylan Thomas was introduced
To Katherine Anne Porter in a room full of
people,
He stooped and picked her up below the thighs
And raised her to the ceiling like a drink,
And held her straight in the slack-jawed
smoke-blue air
Two minutes, five minutes, seven minutes,
While everybody wondered what it meant
To toast the lady with her own body
Or hold her to the light like a plucked
flower."
This exemplifies the man's technique when he was
getting oldish and, like his most recent greatest hero, William
Yeats, had ceased to write poetry exemplarily well and had turned
rather to the process of composing excellent and fascinating
verse-journalism.
It is an easy thing to understand why Karl Shapiro
acquired such an enormous reputation, or such a reputation for
enormity; his poems conveyed a huge personality capable of
announcing its poetry from the mountaintops. He subscribed to the
sincerest form of flattery, which is imitation, and in reading him
we hear so potently the echoes of Swift and Yeats, and Swinburne
and Auden, that sometimes we can scarcely hear Shapiro.
"I dreamed I held a poem and knew
The capture of a living thing.
Boys in Grecian circle sang
And women at their harvesting.
Slowly I tried to wake and draw
The vision after, word by word,
But sleep was covetous: the song
The singers and the singing blurred.
The Paper flowers of everynight
All die. Day has no counterpart,
Where memory writes its boldface wish
And swiftly punishes the heart."
(The Contraband)
This too is purest Yeats from a distance, and Yeats
also understood that it is seemlier to speak well than to speak the
Truth. This is inspired, and, I believe, among the very finest
verses or pieces of poetry of our century.
Being a Jew, he hates Jews, and sometimes he
forgives them for his hatred. He forgives himself for being alive,
continually, continuously. He would dearly love to genuflect and to
sing hosannas but he is excluded from the spiritually regal
company.
"Writing, I crushed an insect with my nail
And thought nothing at all. A bit of wing
Caught my eye then, a gossamer so frail
And exquisite, I saw in it a thing
That scorned the grossness of the thing I
wrote.
It hung upon my finger like a sting.
A leg I noticed next, fine as a mote,
'And on this frail eyelash he walked,' I said,
'And climbed and walked like any mountain
goat.'
And in this mood I sought the little head,
But it was lost: then in my heart a fear
Cried out, 'A life—why beautiful, why
dead!'
It was a mite that held itself most dear,
So small I could have drowned it with a tear."
Constantly he is in greatness.
David Wagoner, Walt Whitman Bathing,
University of Illinois Press, 1325 S. Oak St, Champaign IL 61820;
ISBN 0-252-06570-0, 92pps, npl.
As one becomes immersed initially in these poems
one might wonder why such commotion has been made concerning this
formidable poet, and then slowly one would realize that, without
any proclivity toward pyrotechnics, this man steps assuredly. His
foot goes never wrong.
Sometimes we suspect him of an unearthly
profundity, until we realize he is wholly earthly, earthy, albeit
with a protean mantle. He is always edging carefully toward the
profound, and his humanity is so apparent and so manifest, his joy
in being human and his conscientiousness in being humane is so
vital and so graceful that his poems are paeans to our mysteries
and to our revelations. We follow him, and we abide with him almost
until we too sing hosannas.
Everywhere he is an academic in the best sense. He
would be a mentor, and I have always sought a mentor.
"Now slowly, smoothly flying over the field
Beside the orchard into the after-light
Of the cold evening, the ash gold owls come
sailing
Close to the branches, gliding across the
arbor
Where the bare grapevines ripen only shadows
In the dead of winter, and at the end of a
garden
Suddenly flare their wings; hover,
And swerve, claws first, down to the grass
together."
As we read and as we understand his poems we cannot
escape the certainty that his reflections and his comprehensions
are ours also, and rise within us like the manifest aspect of
Poseidon surging upward through the tumbling roof of the sea. Such
is the cosmic earthbound epiphany we are availed of, blessedly.
