Review: The Irreducible

Author(s): Marie Ponsot

Review by: Marie Ponsot
Source: Poetry, Vol. 95, No. 5 (Feb., 1960), pp. 304-308
Published by: Poetry Foundation
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POETRY

THE IRREDUCIBLE
Helen in Egypt, and Other Plays, by John Heath-Stubbs. Oxford Univer
sity Press. $3.00.
Certain Poems, by John Edward Hardy. Macmillan. $2.75.
A Suit of Nettles, by James Reaney. St. Martin's Press. $3.00.
The Night ofthe Hammer, by Ned O'Gorman. Harcourt, Brace. $3.75.
Poets start from common generalizations, but make their poems out
of, and into, irreducible particulars. These four books share a time, a
language, and a culture rooted in scholarship and Christianity. They show
off the poet's power to turn shared assumptions into poems infinitely
individual.
John Heath-Stubbs has the habit of excellence. In these three lyric
plays-as in poetry and criticism-his range is very wide; his words are
right yet not finicky; he deals deftly with reality, both sensual and his
torical. The jagged dislocations that stardte us awake to some poetry are
absent. The world of these plays holds a grace-addled Arab, an eloquent
ass, Helen, Judas, Eve, all in Christocoherent poise. The Harrowing of
Hell is a mystery play, not quaint, strongly operative within its para
liturgical shape. It was written, and effectively, for church use. As
dramatic dialogue, its poetry is viable anywhere. Its author perfectly
describes The Talking Ass: "a lyrical, comical, liturgical farce; a topical
joke with a pantomime donkey". Balaam, a man in the magic business,
is so visited by grace he turns down wealth, power, and his wife's ap
proval by prophesying the crucified Messiah instead of cursing Israel.
Note that the farce is elegant, and the jokes ironic. Helen in Egypt is a
full-scale romantic comedy, an entirely possible Fair Lady for the com
mercial stage. After Troy's fall, Helen's ship strays to an Egyptian island
she had visited when headed for Troy with Paris. Heath-Stubbs' Helen
never left that island, but grew middle-aged entombed and asleep while
the Egyptians sent an ageless phantom to Troy. Suspense over Helen's
identity dissolves into deeper suspense attendant on Menelaus's decision.
He has forgiven an exquisite young phantom's treachery; he has yet to
see and forgive the truth of his wife, whose body betrayal, war, and
time have aged. The verse in these plays isn't just laid on; it's Heath
Stubbs' natural language. His capacity to forego self-expression in favor
of self-examination gives his characters independence and psychological

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MARIEB PONSOT
rightness. It is from his contemplation of their quality as persons that the
poetry springs. Helen in Egypt has an author's preface remarkable of its
kind; an accurate, pertinent statement of aims and influences. He says
"the meaning of history and the nature of truth" are two of his themes,

and rightly, for the plays are multi-level analogues. They are made
theatrical by well-paced dialogue, right-now liveliness of character and
action, and strong plot in which a clear moment of decision acts as
pivot. They owe their combined intensity and coherence to Heath
Stubbs' really original mind and balanced sensitiveness.
Certain Poems show John Hardy as a poet of difficult, even anguished

questions which he will not compromise or quit. His technique and

imagery are in Spartan service, so closely are the poems molded to his
mind's heart-wrenching endeavor. That he is not deaf or technically
inept at tunefidness is shown by a few pieces like the graceful, most
cavalier, Have I Declared My Love? with a delectable octet that ends, "As
though to be man or beast were but to dance, / And dying to defy such

chance, to dance most well." His vocabulary isn't quixotic, nor his
grammar illegible. Yet the poems' surface is hard going in the way that
the work of the metaphysical poets is said to be. To many readers (me
too) this is irresistible, an excellent device to make readers active acces
sories, so long as they get paid off in poetic satisfaction. For Hardy it's
surely more than a device; it is inevitable. For he writes of what it is
hard to make conscious, hard to feel and think through, and very hard
to reproduce honestly. This intellectual honesty outlaws phrases that are
stale, inaccurate, or simply seductive. Voyeur (about a window-watcher

aware of another window-watcher who has the same girls in view)

explores many kinds of love; it is an undecorated beautiful poem. In
eight poems, Christ is the "panther we pursue." Hardy makes these
poems move out of what he sees from where he is, to how it affects him,

to insight, suddenly seized. It's especially effective in dealing poetically

with the Christian mystery, since it engages the reader on undisputed
and dramatic ground. Take The Chase as example; it both practices and
describes his poetry. It has for subject man's hope of tracking down the
true word right into that order of reality with which both art and reli
gion have always been occupied. He says he wants a language "to hold /
converse and not conform, to be informed / and not reflect"; then he
tells, fast and in depth, of how he once heard a hunter's tale of a great

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POETRY
marauding cat. Then, the last stanza gets him where he wanted to go,
"into the shimmering fields again", mapping out his way to where cre
ative knowledge in art and certitude in cognition may occur. These
"shimmering fields" aren't muzzy-mystic envisionings but the whole
trackless area of human introspection, where strictly speaking anything
can happen. The strength of Certain Poems is in how it conveys what is
most universal and perfectly unique, one man's attack upon apprehension
and comprehension of himself and his acts.
James Reaney's A Suit of Nettles is a rare plant to find greenly flourish

ing on any foundation these days. Genus: satire; species: allegoric verse
essay; attributes: diversity of wit, an ear for intrigue, technical bravura;
habitat: Canada, Earth. It is rare because its satire isn't urbane, wry, sly,

dry, or implied; and its irony is limited to Reaney's attitude toward

poetry and poets. He borrows the superstructure of Spenser's Shepherd's
Calendar, using an eclogue a month to tell a lovetale with interludes. He
romps through a dozen verse styles focused on inanity in permissive edu

cation, arty criticism, propagation of faith in anti-propagation, self

dramatization, and the war between the sexes. He mocks fools rather
than villains; he ridicules the results of excess. His pitch shifts agreeably;

he is brash, merry, deadly, mythic, verbal, hilarious, by turns. (May,

with its birth-control ladies loose in philoprogenitive Quebec, is a very
fimny idea.) He likes the "unpolish'd rugged verse" Donne recommends
for satire (the better to beat with). The athletics of his line is so deliber
ately exercised as to be acrobatic; he puts it into alliterative verse,
quatrains and couplets elegiac, popish, and skeltonian, monologues and
dialogues. It's onlyjust-poeticjustice--that his practice of existing forms
should free him from what is dead in them. The lively ease of the April
poets' contest in praise of spring is typical-one entry is the sturdy, "I
speak, I speak ofthe arable earth, / Black sow goddess huge with birth; /
Cry cry killdeers in her fields . . ."; and the other an exquisitely realized
lyric that the Joyce of Chamber Music would have loved, "Your body is
a bethlehem." At the September country fair, Reaney exhibits nature,
human and agricultural, in guises the romnantics never knew. Goose and
gander soar and fall through a dantesque view of Canada, go on a
merry-go-round of philosophy from eleatics to existentialists, ascend a
ferris wheel of anthropomorphic attempts at God, back into a sideshow,
come out to hear a drunk preacher's sermon on the Last Supper. This

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MARIE PONSOT
calendar of our years is no program for society's sudden improvement.
Keenly observed and boldly noted, it also incidentally favors the non
group virtues of good heart and good sense. These are personified in a
goose-heroine who, unlike many poets' imaginary ladies, is no Maia- or
Kali-female. Reaney's aggressive sanity has made her instead a sisterly
good creature whose active love ofthings, in time, as they are, empowers

her to imagine and believe in perfection while coping to the point of

immolation with the real world.
'Thinking on a work / changes it somehow," Ned O'Gorman's
Michelangelo thrice muses, as he smashes a statue he has spoilt by
"thinking on" it in The Night of the Hammer's tide poem. "My song in
darkness will be found," say the book's last lines. These lyrics do not
depend on ideas or conscious poetic structuring but on associative image
ry. Many of them charm us into sharing the poet's excitement. Similes
tumble up in free play, additive not exhaustive. Subliminal associations
make all literature, even Pope, fresh and hauntingly personal. Marvellous
recent poems are made of them alone (e.g., Cummings, Thomas), wben
a poet's concentric intensity has attracted revelatory, relevant associa
tions. So when O'Gorman has intense concern for a theme, his quick
tongued enthusiasm shapes a lively poem. That attractive enthusiasm
fails to satisfy when he neither edits out irrelevancies nor bends them back
toward the poem. In two-thirds ofthese forty-four lyrics featuring simple

appositives and undeveloped similes, the word "like" occurs, at least

once. He describes by accretion. De Anima II is typical: "The sound of
the soul / is not the sound of a bell. / It is a still clock, / a horn not
touched, / a giraffe, an idea of mallets, / being all things that would be
written down by an unbeliever. / I think it is more likely to be / a hoot
owl / a hoot owl and a nightingale together, a line of drummers, / a tug
o-war, an idea of arrows / being all things that would be written down /

by a believer / but / I tend to think that perhaps the things of men /

believers or not, contain contradictions." Neither the list of soul-like

noises nor the last banal couplet tells me what this "soul" is, that takes
"sound" as an attribute. This vagueness may be because neither subject
nor symbols are thoroughly felt, conceived, or lived; the poet has not

only "an idea" of arrows and mallets, but a notion of nightingales,

giraifes, persons. Other poems offer many such images, from puzzles
like "growling gulls" and "awash with sinew" to rare clear pleasures like

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POETRY
"iliads of light". These aren't think-pieces or purely composed technical

inventions. The words-which are means and matter-must carry the

weight. When they don't work either as big magic or as parlor tricks,
the poem crumbles. It's in the several poems about members of his im
mediate family and in the few verbal incantations, that O'Gorman en
tirely succeeds. Here his omnipresent noun-modifier images are fresh,
decent, and exciting. (I note an unusual, almost French, lack of that par
ticular strength of English, transitive verbs.) Assonance and alliteration,
ad lib. rather than as over-all structure, make up his music. Family poems

apart, his relation to his subject is casual, and operates to diminish. High

matters are at home here; there are quaint or cozy bright sayings on
Jehovah, the Virgin Mary, Gabriel the Archangel, Cain, Abel, Homer,
Yeats, the crucifixion, the creation, the sea. O'Gorman offers some sur
prises, mostly verbal, but no sense of awe in dealing with great things;
mysterium tremendum is domesticated. This is charming. I also find it
arch. When arch, O'Gorman's relation to his subject is that of a light
versifier; his form, however, hasn't the versatility and enormous, if
limited, skills light verse demands. Yet, he is capable of newness, bril
liance, and conveyed emotion. He also attracts many readers who do
not ordinarily care for poetry. It would be wonderful to imagine him
using his capability all the time.
Each of these four books has a passage celebrating the Christian mys
tery of the Passion. Balaam withdraws from his vision of it, crying, "I
cannot su?fer that look of infinite pardon ... I cannot bear this destruc
tion of my pride." Reaney's drunk preacher shouts, "So you've all cer
tainly betrayed him so you've done / Something for him by my bottle
faith fiddlededee you have." Hardy's Good Friday poem has great im
plosive force; it begins quietly, "Indeed it must have offended the very
wrist of the carpenter's boy, when every way for sunday / he stretched

his frame to fit that sorry botched / and knocked together thing."
O'Gorman's fourth Adjective Toward the Description of a Crucifix inverts

the field-glasses; the viewed object is not brought closer but diminished;

the crucifixion is seen as like O'Gorman's poems: "because these songs

are crosscrossed / with rhyme which catches up the tags of sense. /

Crucfixion was all that...."

MARIE PONSOT

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