Four Poets and Their Songs

By Paul Gray

An epic in progress and brief, memorable histories

MIRABELL: BOOKS OF NUMBER by James Merrill Atheneum; 182 pages; $10.95

The centerpiece of Divine Comedies (1976), James Merrill's last book of poetry, was a 90-page narrative that turned a parlor game into a trip through the first circles of the supernatural. The Book of Ephraim recounted how Merrill and his friend David Jackson used a Ouija board to contact Ephraim, a witty Greek Jew born in A.D. 8; it then followed the two-way conversations that ensued over the next 20 years. This device gave the added ballast of history to Merrill's already established lyric and autobiographical skills; Ephraim's was the spirit of a number of ages, and he proved himself to be a talkative and entertaining tour guide. The imaginary collaboration yielded a poem of rare ambition and scope, a sinuous, sensuous meditation on death and timelessness.

Mirabell: Books of Number takes what began as a baroque saga and amplifies it to an epic. The new book again offers Merrill, Jackson and a Ouija board. The place is their house in Stonington, Conn., the time the summer of 1976. Ephraim reappears, although vastly overshadowed by the band of dark creatures urgently seeking the poet's attention. They are the fallen angels, now reduced to minding the machinery set in motion by God, whom they call Biology. As the enspirited cup moves among the capital letters on the Ouija board, their plea is spelled out: FIND US BETTER PHRASES FOR THESE HISTORIES WE POUR FORTH/ HOPING AGAINST HOPE THAT MAN WILL LOVE HIS MIND & LANGUAGE. Merrill modestly replies: "Today that's a responsibility/ Not to be faced." Then curiosity gets the better of him: "On with the history!"

And what a history: primordial creation, the slow appearance of grassy Edens, the rise and fall of Atlantis and the centaurs, the fatal presumptuousness of Akhnaton and Queen Nefertiti, God Biology's new orders for the progress of mankind: THERE SHALL BE NO ACCIDENT, THE SCRIBE SHALL/ SUPPLANT RELIGION, & THE ENTIRE APPARATUS/ DEVELOP THE WAY TO PARADISE. The dark powers are given the responsibility of setting up a research laboratory to clone worthy souls. Mirabell, the name Merrill gives his chief informant, explains: A MERE 2 MILLION CLONED SOULS LISTEN TO EACH OTHER WHILE/ OUTSIDE THEY HOWL & PRANCE SO RECENTLY OUT OF THE TREES. What has alarmed Heaven and agitated Mirabell to speak is a recent cloud on the human horizon: A CONCERTED USE OF ATOMIC/ WEAPONRY NOW FALLING INTO HANDS OF ANIMALS SOULS.

Merrill is of course up to something more complex than chanting "No more nukes," although that message is undeniably in the work. The cosmology he assembles is as elaborate and beautiful as any set to poetry since Yeats wrote of gyres and phases of the moon. It also dances with humor. The late W.H. Auden, now an onlooker in heaven, plays an owlish Vergil to Merrill's Dante. "Did you realize," Merrill asks, "that people have plutonium in their lymph glands?" Auden taps back: SURELY ONLY THE BETTER CLASSES.

Among the other marvels is Merrill's mastery of forms, so skillful as to pass by almost unnoticed. Humans speak in a supple, casually rhymed iambic pentameter. A hurricane strikes the East Coast:

. . . Attempting to reheat Last night's coffee, toast some raisin bread, We find our electricity gone dead. Now each his own conductor, and at more Than concert pitch, rips through his repertoire On the piano while the other races For towels and pots--no end of dripping places.

Yet Merrill's own repertoire includes a Horatian ode, several forms of sonnets, a slightly modified villanelle and a stretch of Dantesque terza rima.

Unlike wine, great poems do not require aging. But they must wait for an audience to grow up to them. While this process takes place, another pleasure is promised. Mirabell foretells a concluding sequel, when the angels themselves will speak. Since Merrill, 53, already writes like one, it will be hard to wait for what they have to say. NATURAL HISTORIES by Leslie Ullman Yale University; 53 pages; $8.95 hardcover, $3.95 paperback

The Yale Series of Younger Poets has produced such distinguished alumni as John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich and Muriel Rukeyser. This year's winner, selected from a field of 475, is Leslie Ullman, 31, a college teacher now living in Kansas City, and she has already cleared the first two hurdles facing all beginning poets: having something to say and saying it well. Ullman stakes a claim on the borderline between the real and the imagined. Her people, mostly women waiting for something or someone, are mercurial consciousnesses flowing smoothly from past to future or recording temperatures that have not yet occurred. One woman preens in a room, anticipating the man who is to meet her, smiling at herself as he might. Conclusion is anticlimax:

And when the man arrives looking for someone slender, someone smelling of petals, someone whose hands might follow

the curve of his great sadness he finds strands of long hair in the brush,

long dresses in the closet, himself in the mirror with a young girl who keeps rising to touch books and small objects,

who keeps looking out the window as if someone were waiting.

Such encounters haunt the mind after the words are over. Ullman's fluid imagination marks her as the one she addresses in a poem: "You no longer know a difference/ between question and travel."

7 YEARS FROM SOMEWHERE by Philip Levine Atheneum; 70 pages; $4.95 Philip

Philip Levine's poems vibrate between the down but not out and the out but not down. His speakers are guerrillas, trapped in an endless battle long after the war has been lost. Their milieu is one of industrial detritus; they drift through the abandoned sets of grade-B thrillers:

. . . I thought I could hold the darkness the way a man holds a cup of coffee before he wakens, the way he pulls at a cigarette and wonders how he came to this room, the walls scarred with the gray brush of years. . .

Levine's short muscular lines capture not just the sense of loss but also the wonder that loss antedates. Oddly, the memory dodges bathos and becomes elegiac. A grown man retraces the field where he once hacked away at milkweed plants, and sees "a froth of seeds" from the plants' descendants drifting by. Another sojourner in the past thinks of Detroit (where Levine, 51, was born), and then of snow; he translates it into the tears of souls lost and gone to heaven: and given their choice chose then to return to earth, to lay their great pale cheek against the burning cheek of earth and say, There, there child.

NEW & SELECTED THINGS TAKING PLACE by May Swenson Atlantic-Little, Brown 301 pages; $12. 50

This handsome collection of works old and new is a proper retrospective for a writer who has become, in the past 25 years, one of the most accessible of all living .U.S. poets. Her works have appeared nearly everywhere, from the quarterlies and The New Yorker to the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune Magazine. Such popularity does not come free. At her least strenuous, Swenson picks up quotidian chatter and reproduces it:

Like, everyone wants to look black in New York these days. Faces with black lenses, black frames around the eyes, faces framed in black beards. Afros on all the blacks-- beautiful. But like, everyone looks puff-headed.

She even commits that most worn-out philistine pastime, making fun of abstract art. The happy news is that such limp work forms a minority in the book. Swenson is at her best in natural, isolated settings. Her eye for detail is both loving and fierce. She runs alone on a beach:

My twin, my sprinting shadow on yellow shag, wand of summer over my head, it seems that we could run forever while the strong waves crash. But the sun takes its belly under. Flashing above magnetic peaks of the ocean's purple heave, the gannet climbs, and turning, turns to a black sword that drops, hilt-down, to the deep.

This aching sense of impermanence, of pleasure heightened by its imminent disappearance, is a constant refrain in Swenson's best poems. September is her season:

. . . A lateborn cardinal ticks and whistles--too pale and thin. Too vivid, the last pink petunia's indrawn mouth.

--Paul Gray

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.