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ShareWith National Poetry Month in April, it seems appropriate to look at new books by some of our most important poets. Wisdom, in our sped-up, mechanistic culture, is rare, and wisdom expressed in memorable language, rarer still; collectively, these poets are aiming for a kind of enlightenment for our time of chaos and disillusionment.
Three of these — Kay Ryan, Sherod Santos and Edward Hirsch — bring us selected poems from late in their careers, while the younger two — Bob Hicok and Tony Hoagland, both masters of the popular idiom converted to lyrical immediacy — offer us significant new mid-career books.
Current poet laureate Ryan is a masterful minimalist, choosing words with extreme care, gems to be appreciated with maximum concentration. Santos has remained at a distance from the confessionalist tradition all his life, simultaneously enamored and wary of it; his selected poems let us trace the arc of his maturity.
It is rewarding to have Hirsch’s first selected poems, culled from 30 years of devotion to the craft. Hicok and Hoagland are more attuned to the larger political climate, their characteristic humor torching the way past the dungeons we would rather not see.
Ryan has always been an acolyte of epigrams, a hallowed form of wisdom literature. Despite her short lines and pithy concessions, it’s only partly true to call her a minimalist, because she’s not the least bashful toward reality.
Ryan’s poems are miniature representations of the poet’s thought process, as in “Attention”: “As strong as / the suction cups / on the octopus / are the valves / of the attention.”
In “Least Action,” she suggests the world might renew itself “by adjusting little parts / a little bit — turning / a cup a quarter inch / or scooting up a bench.“In “Lacquer Artist,” her art is like “the patience / of the lacquer artist seated / at his task — eighty / coats per Japanese box.”
Ryan’s poetry of incremental restoration appreciates awareness through aging and asserts the mind’s superiority. In “Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard,” Ryan says: “And when life stops, / a certain space — / however small — / should be left scarred / by the grand and / damaging parade.”
Santos’ influences are Greek mythology, Nietzschean paganism and impressionism. He approaches confessionalism with a chaste, pre-emptive flavor.
The book’s emotional heart is mental illness and suicide in “Elegy for My Sister”: “And so it continues, day after day, this endless succession of / moments culled haphazard from the staticky dark.”
In “A Writer’s Life,” promise is unrealizable: ” ‘My gift,’ a sort of / Promissory note the Certitudes launched / Toward a future where, at journey’s end, / It would be redeemed in a light like that / Which falls across the bees-waxed transoms / Of Vermeer.”
Santos is more skeptical now of confession’s purifying capacity. In “An Ordinary Evening in St. Petersburg” he yearns for the empty space between literary works that makes up a virtuous life.
Edward Hirsch’s poetry has always sought transcendence in a world corrupted by power and tyranny. Hirsch goes right up to the dark matter in human relationships, asking impossible questions, however it makes him look.
His “shadowy, grief-stricken need for freedom / laboring to express itself through him” (the “Poet at Seven”), discovers a form of melancholy akin to ecstasy.
Hirsch becomes supplicant to his artistic forebears, pleading for a temporary grace where he may discover the meaning of love.
In “Earthly Light,” the 17th-century Dutch painters “prayed obliquely / by turning away from the other world / and detailing the plenitude of this.” Hirsch meditates on Oscar Ginsburg (“Love, for Jews, is nothing if not bookish”) and Colette (“Among all the forms of truly absurd courage / the recklessness of young girls is outstanding”).
Hirsch moves toward a welcome discursiveness and expansive empathy, as in “Two Suitcases of Children’s Drawings From Terezin, 1942-1944”: “Not even the teacher / who studied at the Bauhaus / could draw the face of God.”
Hicok is squarely in the tradition of the American poet speaking as quintessential ordinary man. Political, cultural and ecological crises have affected his former animal spirits (“Endangered Species,” the title of one poem, might as well be the title of the book); he tries on the role of social prognosticator, finding it doesn’t suit.
In “Redoubling Our Efforts,” he writes that though “I’m not smart enough for Bob Hicok Two or Bob, The Sequel, / maybe I’m a prequel of myself.” Standing by as bemused bystander is losing charm. “Watchful” asserts: “I know no soldiers / I write poems, we are phantoms to each other, / such that saying no to war is not real, saying yes to war / is not real.”
The Virginia Tech mass killer greatly occupies him. In “Mute,” hearing the killer’s “mad conviction / that we made him trigger a hundred rounds, / is to realize he lived tongueless / in me.” We are most responsible when we least accept it.
Hicok’s characteristic humor fights to a standoff with his new agony.
In his wisest, best book yet, Hoagland takes unflinching measure of our hyper-consumerist economy, faltering empire and phony personal relations. Everywhere junk and tastelessness pervert beauty.
Proud of our postmodern, post-racial culture, we’re actually automatons turned out by the command-and-control system. In “Big Grab,” “Out on Route 28, the lights blaze all night / on a billboard of a beautiful girl / covered with melted cheese — .” Shopping with his niece in “At the Galleria,” Hoagland remarks, “So we were turned into Americans / to learn something about loneliness.”
“Dialectical Materialism” is Hoagland’s Allen Ginsberg-like trip to the cornucopian supermarket: “My god, there is so much sorrow in the grocery store!” How can we not “weep at the scale of subjugated matter: / the ripped up etymologies of kiwi fruit and bratwurst, / the roads paved with dead languages, / the jungles digested by foreign money.”
Diminished vocabularies are the ether in which we conduct ourselves as cheerful Americans. In “Disaster Movie” America is a “jumbo jet… / gone down in the jungle in my dream.” Yet “what was sweet in the dream was the quiet / resilience of those little Americans,” including “an AA meeting in progress by one of the enormous, flattened tires.”
Hoagland compares the Washington, D.C., sniper to “a surrealist travel agent / booking departures only / Or ... a dada lawyer without a client / arguing in thirty-caliber sentences.”
Ryan, Santos, Hirsch, Hicok and Hoagland are all to be applauded for having committed high treason against the rule of pacifying linear thought.
