The Need to Know

IMPERATIVES (52 pp.)--Anthony Ostroff --Harcourt, Brace & World ($3.95).

Poetry's Rational Man was long ago shipped off to Understanding's rest home, where for half a century he has quietly reminisced about the days when things were as they seemed to be. Poets since then, obsessed by various psychiatric worries and the sound words make when dropped at random, have largely ignored poetry's old didactic chore: refining and explaining experience. The occasional poet who addresses man's need to know the lessons poetry alone can teach (Robert Lowell, for example) has seemed remarkably clear--perhaps even brave. Such a poet is Anthony Ostroff, whose first volume is as visionary as it is precise.

A teacher of English and literature at the University of California, Associate Professor Ostroff, 38, at first appears to be merely an observer, setting his view of things in an orderly, formal verse that is metered, rhymed and spare. But with the resolution of each poem, it becomes evident that he is above all an epistemologist, tirelessly examining the nature of understanding, endlessly checking the value of knowledge. In The Lady and the Physician, Ostroff has his doctor, who writes a prescription for a case of cosmic loneliness, muse on the nature of blunt science:

And when she was gone the doctor thought On science, so much like beauty, so inexact, The marvelous form of Which never worked out but was a matter of fact.

Ostroff's touch is also lyrical ("I see your several faces, sculptured, each/An agony too pale for flesh to bear"), occasionally dramatic, now and then humorous. In Soeren-Regina, based on Soeren Kierkegaard's love for Regine Olsen, whose girl-child beauty haunted him all his life, he combines all his various talents in his wisest answer to the persisting theme of thought v. beauty, mind v. soul: I write, he said. Too stupid to fly, Too impure to do real magic, I, To work the transformation in a wink, Must painfully and tediously think.

I fly, said she. Miraculously light, I am too rare and beautiful to write. I alone can dance the clouds and sing The fragile air to shapes of anything.

I, he said, desire you--and to soar, But I am heavy, the world is either/or And I know that to be is not to be content. So heavy, I am determined on descent.

Then burn! she sang. For flames consume the air! Your weight shall win! I will be yours somewhere! I am confused! he cried in flames. Undone ! You're mine to burn? Bright love, what have I won?

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