The Eternal Riddles

IN THE ROSE OF TIME (150 pp.)--Robert Fitzgerald --New Directions ($3).

One job of a good poet is to pose riddles--riddles of life, death and immortality--for the heart to answer. The difference between a good and a great poet lies in the lyricism, evocation and after effect of his oracular lines and, most important, in the cry of recognition drawn from the reader. This collection of poems, written over the past 25 years, falls far short of greatness, yet has extraordinary appeal. Fitzgerald blends his commitment to the present with a deep love of the pagan past (with Dudley Fitts, he has ably translated Sophocles' Oedipus Rex), and his work flickers in and out of the centuries. A singing Georgic to husbandry,

Northward the steep world rises to
Scythia
And south of Libya descends, where
black
Styx and the lowest of the dead look on,

comes a few pages before Cobb Would Have Caught It, a poem as brash and contemporary as a jukebox:

Coming in stubby and fast, the baseman
Gathers a grounder in fat green grass,
Picks it stinging and clipped as wit
Into the leather . . .

Essentially, Fitzgerald is a reportorial poet: what he has felt does not come so easily, but what he has seen and experienced, he can transmit beautifully. There is the omnivorous movie screen ("A square of sucking brilliance in the dark"), a storm-tossed ship, the shock of an operation:

A mound under a sheet, a square of pale
Mortal flesh incised in a seeping line,
Spreading its lips for pretty butchery.

Fitzgerald writes of loneliness and puzzled men, of the ancients crying on their gods and moderns trembling in the night, of war and love and the waiting grave. He tries his hand (not too happily) at a new translation of Catullus' famed lament for his dead brother, and does better with one of the Roman poet's many farewells to his tartish Lesbia. The final poem of the book, History, combines his sense of the past with the immediacy of the present, his feeling for place with his reverence for God. And the concluding lines, though aimed at all mankind, could serve to describe the poet himself, as one who

. . . burned, a quiet wick in a wild night,
Loving what lie beheld and will behold.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.