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Modern American poetry often seems to have an assured,
inconsequential sense of drift unavailable to English writers. The American
poet is no less aware of formal patterning, sudden illuminations, the casual,
ironic undercutting phrase than the English writer, but there's a sense of
looseness, a suppleness to be found in some American poetry that seems very
elusive elsewhere. Maybe they just play free verse tennis more expertly than
we do ?
This new collection of Gluck's work finds this Pulitzer Prize-winning
poet writing with grace and
assurance about human time, dreams, adolescence (especially) and the
quotidian rituals of everyday life. At times, there is a conversational,
authentic sense to the writing not a million miles from Robert Frost:
'Burning Leaves' (one of three poems titled thus) covers very similar subject-matter and stops short of
overt symbolism at the end: 'it is obvious they are not defeated, / merely
dormant or resting, though no one knows / whether they represent life or
death.' There is a casual shrug here highly reminiscent of Frost's 'Gathering
Leaves' or 'A Leaf-Treader' and it's seen also in 'Sunset' and longer pieces
like 'March' ['It's a little early for all this'] with very fine attention
to tonal variation.
Read through, the poems work incrementally, though I'm unconvinced by the
blurb-writer's hints that the whole collection is carefully-patterned. The
poems about adolescence, mostly written as past tense narrative memories,
veer close to confessional without ever fully embracing the mode:
'Midsummer', one of the most affecting, recalls swimming in an old quarry in
the evening, eating peaches, waiting for the heat to break in the Summer. It
sounds worryingly like the plot of an early Bruce Springsteen song, but there
is no bombast, nor forced rhetoric here: the voice of the poet quietly goes
on talking, recalling 'we could see a baby was going to come out of all that
kissing', discussing the daring surrenders, the pairing-off, and eventually,
the sense of loss recovered in adulthood when thinking back at those times.
'At the Dance' takes this story a stage or two further, exploring the puzzled
sense of loss that time passing often brings: 'how were these things
decided?'
The narrative sense thickens when you notice the constant use of the third
person, so that when GlŸck switches to what sounds like a personal anecdote -
'When I'm in moods like that...' ('Via Delle Ombre') there is a slight
frisson. Mostly, however, there is a sense of personal displacement at work here which helps avoid the
dramatic plunge into confessional. This avoidance of rhetorical technical
gestures lends a strangely understated timbre to many of these poems, and
although there are Mediterranean references, much of the setting here feels
like some backwater of the American Midwest, although this may be a function
of the backward glances in many of them. This is a collection which grows in
power on re-reading and the quiet insistence of the voice in these poems
becomes very compelling.
© Martin
Caseley 2010
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