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Beyond Here by Jim Green, and Silence Like the Sun by John Hicks

1984; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 19; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wal.1984.0083

1948-7142

Peter Stevens,

Poetry Analysis and Criticism

Reviews 143 detonation, sometimes of a flashy idea; the whole display — a little message packing a wallop and encased in an aura of wonder. Much has been made of such “poems.” Hugh Kenner, in a recent review of this new collection (Harper’s, September, 1983), claims the familiar “I Know a Man” (from For Love, 1962) is “one of the most quietly influential of modem American poems.” “As I sd to my / friend, because I am / always talking, — John, I . . . drive, he sd, for / christ’s sake, look / out where yr going.” Now and then such a caper will work very well indeed, as in “The Teachings” (from In London, 1972) : “of my grandmother / who at over eighty / went west from West Acton, / to see a long lost son named / Archie . . . and / she never spoke of him again.” But too often Creeley does not keep his powder dry or his act together, and we are left pondering in dismay: Has post-modernism come to this? Yet there are quite a number of fine, provocative poems here, like the haunting three-pager, “The Door” (from For Love): “It is hard going to the door / cut so small in the wall where./ the vision which echoes loneliness / brings a scent of wild flowers in a wood.” Withal, Creeley has too frequently turned the virtues of confessional and anti-rational poetry into vices. Thought is too much with him, it becomes (as Thomas Hardy said in one of his novels) “a disease of flesh.” But Creeley, with his considerable poetic gifts, must realize the dangers of being taken with every jot and tittle of the daily trivia. His no-nonsense admission in “ ‘I Keep to Myself Such Measures . . .’” (from Words, 1967) says it all. “I keep to myself such,/ measures as I care for, / daily the rocks / accumulate position. / There is nothing / but what thinking makes / it less tangible.... All /forgets. My mind sinks. / I hold in both hands such weight / it is my only description.” In view of all that I have said above, it is still possible to get quite a bang out of reading such a minimalist-projectionist. SAMUEL IRVING BELLMAN California State Polytechnic University, Pomona Beyond Here. By Jim Green. (Saskatoon: Thistledown Press, 1983. 55 pages, $7.95 paper, $16 cloth.) Silence Like the Sun. By John Hicks. (Saskatoon: Thistledown Press, 1983. 105 pages, $7.95 paper, $20 cloth.) The Canadian Rockies demand a hard, clear language, and Jim Green’s language in Beyond Here is generally stripped and sheared, the scenes pre­ sented in poems starkly and realistically, as in a hard-edged photograph. Indeed, the book closes with two poems based on photographs, the first of these a portrayal of events surrounding the objects in the photograph, the second descriptive but unfinished, as if the poet is stepping outside the photo­ graph to suggest the something “beyond” indicated in the title. 144 Western American Literature While the poems give realistic scenes and occasionally compelling images, the poems seldom reveal the “beyond.” Green’s epigraph to this volume of poems is taken from Gary Snyder, a comment that suggests that inner and outer landscapes merge. But the poems are not really revelatory of the poet’s inner landscape; the details remain on the surface, however accurately that observed detail may be. The poet adopts a kind of laconic toughness that sometimes paradoxically drops away to something near sentimentality. The shearing away of language leads him to drop definite articles, result­ ing in lines approaching telegraphese which take on an almost doggerel rhythm. At other times, the rhythms are prosaic, and some poems are thinly anecdotal, never rising into anything “beyond.” Beyond Here contains poems of direct observation, open-eyed, openminded apprehensions of the country and of some of the men working in it, but too often the poems lack the insistent pressure of a language clarifying and expanding beyond the surface. John Hicks is comfortable in his language. It has fluency and a steady pulse, but with little of the hardness of Green’s. In fact, Hicks’s poetry, for the most part, takes place in a kind of limbo: there is little that defines its place. There...