Five Voices and Harmonies

By Paul Gray

Verse turns few profits, but the art remains healthy

To the despair of their accountants, publishers continue to release books of poetry--more than 400 a year in the U.S. That number is swelled by vanity presses and duplicating or mimeograph machines. Almost no one makes money in the process. New poetry volumes are not piled up by cash registers; some stores even begrudge them shelf space. Yet the situation is not as dismal as it seems. Poets continue to write, and persistent readers continue to find them. Promising new voices speak out; others fulfill earlier promises. This season offers five books that are worth tracking down.

THE FORTUNATE TRAVELLER by Derek Walcott; Farrar Straus Giroux; 99 pages; $11.95. Travel brochures sensibly omit certain details about the Caribbean. In his sixth book of poems, Derek Walcott corrects the sunny picture.

Can this be the right place?

These islands of the blest, cheap package tours replaced by politics, rain, unrest?

Walcott, 52, was born in St. Lucia and still lives part of each year in Trinidad. He brings a highly developed poetic skill to bear on underdeveloped areas. His point of view is both privileged and painful: "I accept my function as a colonial upstart at the end of an empire, a single, circling, homeless satellite." The upstart has not lacked for recognition; last year Walcott received an award from the John D. and Catherine MacArthur Foundation that will yield him $48,000 annually for five years. Yet estrangement is not a matter of finances: "I am thinking of an exile farther than any country."

The Fortunate Traveller moves between the civilized U.S. and subjugated, sunstruck islands. Walcott can find a lasting home in neither place. In the U.S. he catches signs of "the galloping hysterical abhorrence of my race." In Port of Spain, he discovers that "junta and coup d'etat, the newest Latino mood/ broods on the balcony." He takes on the identity of Spoiler, a dead man allowed briefly to leave hell and revisit his old haunts. He improvises, calypso style:

All Port of Spain is a twelve-thirty show,

some playing Kojak, some Fidel Castro,

some Rastamen, but, with or without locks,

to Spoiler is the same old khaki socks . . .

Such resignation recurs throughout the book: things are not going to get better, anywhere. But individual poems shimmer with exotic rhythms and flash with tropical colors. Walcott's circular pilgrimage is painful and moving; it also traverses some enchanting scenery.

THE COUNTRY BETWEEN US by Carolyn Forche; Harper & Row; 59 pages; $11.50 (hardback), $5.95 (paper). After winning the Yale Younger Poets competition in 1976, Carolyn Forche paid extended visits to El Salvador, working as a journalist and human rights advocate. She could not have known that land would be Topic A in the U.S. just at the time her second book appeared; thanks to that coincidence, though, some of the poems in The Country Between Us have the urgency of news bulletins:

Tell them about retaliation:

Jose lying

on the flat bed truck, waving

his stumps

in your face, his hands cut off

by his captors and thrown to the

many acres

of cotton . . .

The brutalities visited on the helpless naturally arouse Forche's sympathy and anger. She makes pain palpable. Yet her accounts of antigovernment rebels are neither polemical nor romanticized: "It is not Che Guevara, this struggle." She addresses the guerrillas as friends but tells them what they do not want to hear:

Your women walk among

champas

with baskets of live hens,

grenades and fruit.

Tonight you begin to fight

for the most hopeless of

revolutions.

This is a bleak message, passionately stated. That description holds for the poems in this volume that are not about El Salvador; meditations on Viet Nam, Czechoslovakia, relatives, friends, lovers old and new: "We have, each of us, nothing./ We will give it to each other." Forche, 31, grew up in Michigan and has traveled extensively throughout the U.S. and abroad. What she has seen of the world so far has not made her a reassuring poet; but she is something better, an arresting and often unforgettable voice.

HUNDREDS OF FIREFLIES by Brad Leithauser; Knopf; 71 pages; $11.50 (hardback), $5.95 (paper). A first book of poems inspires the same questions and fears as the debut of a trapeze act: Can the new performer fly and then land safely? Brad Leithauser, 28, settles all doubts with his opening act. "An Expanded Want Ad" describes the virtues of an out-of-the-way country house and its environs:

The jolting road,

two muddy ruts, flanks a

weedy fan that slithers against the

underside of a car, then rises unbowed

but better still, go on foot. . .

After that acrobatic "weedy fan" and the return to earth, the audience can relax. Everything is going to be just fine.

As its title suggests, Hundreds of Fireflies offers a swarm of small, bright illuminations, familiar objects cast in sudden incandescence. A green frog on a dead stump prompts a quick reverie: "It requires no large hop/ of imagination to see him as/ the downed trunk's surviving outlet." The daytime moon appears "frail as a spot of breath/ on a windowpane." In "Miniature," flowers are magnified to astronomical proportions:

One dandelion

is yellow, is a solar flame

spoking from a green nether

rim; the other gray, a dainty

crumb-cake of a moon.

Such moments belong to the lyric, but Leithauser displays a knack for narrative as well. In "Two Summer Jobs," he lightly recalls himself as an aspiring poet, marking time: teaching tennis to Michigan matrons before entering Harvard in the fall of 1971 and, eight years later, clerking in a law firm in Manhattan. In Central Park, he meets an old college classmate and rival: "Mark's a poet too, if you take/ the thought for the deed--but who am I to talk?" That was in 1979. Leithauser has since earned the license to talk (and write) as much as he wants.

THE KISS: A JAMBALAYA by John Frederick Nims; Houghton Mifflin; 68 pages; $11.95 (hardback), $6.95 (paper). Since 1978 John Frederick Nims has been the editor of Poetry, the venerable Chicago-based monthly that helped launch the careers of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. Besides shouldering this tradition and the morose routine of rejecting manuscripts, Nims, 68, has continued to teach, lecture, translate poems from a variety of tongues and edit anthologies. He has plenty of workaday excuses to be a dull boy. Yet The Kiss, the sixth collection of his own poetry, glitters with wit and erudite tomfoolery. Its 44 poems turn the act of puckering up into cerebrations whimsical and sensuous: "A poem: most like a kiss. A play of shapes/ that search, researching over the perfect shape/ to stop the mo-ment-in-time and stamp it: This. "

That heartfelt stasis is just what the best poems in this volume create. "How to Tell the Girls from the Flowers" moves from the peck on the cheek of its title into a brief and painful embrace:

Both sway. Are fragrant

mostly. Wells for dew.

Have their one season early.

Tell the two First by their gaze, half hid

with lash or leaf-Eyes of the girl go deeper.

Wells for grief.

Nims offers himself as an old-fashioned lover of forms, both female and poetic. He bows gracefully to ottava rima, the sonnet and ballad. "Verse without rhyming was a toothless mouth," he insists at one point; elsewhere, he disguises his own bite with barely detectable assonances like "hankering" and "merry thing." He toys with words to tickle emotions. In "Dawn Song," a man gets up after a night of lovemaking and praise from his partner, and faces himself in the bathroom mirror:

Image: in the dismal sink, Skinny, shivering, I blink.

Back to the deep bed go

weaving,

Which--the glass or you ?--believing?

Trust language, the poem concludes, helping to make its own case in the process. A kiss, under ideal conditions, combines technical expertise with passion; The Kiss reproduces and preserves both.

THE COMPLETE CLERIHEWS OF E. CLERIHEW BENTLEY; Oxford; 145 pages; $12.95. In 1890 a 16-year-old schoolboy at St. Paul's in London was touched by a slightly disheveled muse. He wrote:

Sir Humphry Davy

Abominated gravy.

He lived in the odium

Of having discovered Sodium.

Thus was born the first clerihew, the brainchild of Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956). Bentley went on to write detective novels, including Trent's Last Case (1912), and to compose editorials for the Daily Telegraph. But his fame was ensured by those dotty four-line biographies that kept punctuating his otherwise respectable existence. He lived to see his middle name enshrined in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The Complete Clerihews gathers all 140 examples of the master's voice, along with the drawings that accompanied their publication (Bentley's illustrators included O.K. Chesterton and his own son Nicolas). This collection helps define the form. Unlike the limerick, its distant relative, the clerihew does not accommodate bawdiness or strong feelings of any other kind. Liberal in spirit, with some upper-class conservative leanings, Bentley roundly detested the Nazis. Yet his clerihew on the subject mocks rather than jeers:

"The mustache of Adolf Hitler

Could hardly be littler,"

Was the thought that kept

recurring

To Field-Marshal Goering.

And though many other poets, including WH. Auden, have attempted clerihews, no one has matched the chemistry of the young Bentley on Sir Humphry Davy. For example:

E. Clerihew Bentley

Cannot be recalled

sentimentally.

He invented a sort of verse

That made his imitators look worse.

--By Paul Gray

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