Masters of the Art. - The Traveler's Calendar: New Poems; Collected Poems: 1952-1999 - book review

National Review, July 29, 2002 by James Panero

The Traveler's Calendar: New Poems, by Daniel Mark Epstein (Overlook Press, 112 pp., $24.95)

Collected Poems: 1952-1999, by Robert Mezey (Arkansas, 304 pp., $22)

Readers will have noticed that National Review has been publishing serious poetry for nearly a year. Among the poets are Daniel Mark Epstein and Robert Mezey.

The distinguished poet Donald Hall has written of Daniel Mark Epstein, winner of the Prix de Rome, that he has "a vision as tortured and powerful as early Robert Lowell." Would you like to be described in this way? Probably not; Lowell was, after all, insane. But in Epstein's case, the comment resonates as praise: In his poems, moments of danger shimmer with heroic light. In "The Lion Tamer at 2:00 A.M.," for example, Epstein takes on the voice of a circus ringmaster:

The crowd is always on the lion's side

Against the man with the whip.

They wish the spangled girl would slip

From her spotlight on the trapeze

And fall like a meteor on the

ringmaster.

The inner eye turns glory to disaster.

Hard to survive this art, harder to

please.

Note the rhyme scheme: the surprise of whip/slip, the wit of ringmaster/disaster, the satisfaction of trapeze/please. Epstein delivers the unexpected with a showman's flourish. This slim volume, his seventh collection of poetry, has a breadth as great as the cultural landscape itself: Houdini, Edmund Morris's biography of Ronald Reagan, Pisa, Baudelaire, the execution of Timothy McVeigh. The theme of death, or of "death-defying" -- of time and the seasons, of the narrowing separation between life and death -- punctuates The Traveler's Calendar.

Epstein's new book arrives with the birth of his child ("t.h.e.") and his own middle age: "It was the middle of my life / If I were to live so many years again" ("The Royal Hotel in Pisa"). But the mortality lesson is gentle, sweet, never hectoring: "I thought of the poet's burden / To teach and delight, / No matter how little one knows / Or how much joy one is given" ("On the Official Biography of Ronald Reagan").

Robert Mezey crafts poetry with a deviousness that alternates between high classicism and friendly, sometimes bawdy witticism. While Epstein might be Pliny the Elder rushing to his destruction on Mount Vesuvius, Mezey is Juvenal or Catullus, most content in love, in companionship, in games: "Paul Gauguin / Was a ladies' man. / He loved them in Tahiti and Provence. / Honi soit qui mal y pense" ("Interlude: More Clerihews").

This is not to suggest that Mezey is unserious -- one finds here friendship, family, the death of those beloved -- yet to borrow a line from NR senior editor Jeffrey Hart, the California-based Mezey smiles through his own catastrophes. In Mezey's accomplished hands, thoughts of time's passage become a meditation on life, as in the beautiful "Tea Dance at the Nautilus Hotel (1925)":

But they danced here sixty-five years

ago! --

Almost all of them must be under-

ground.

Who could be left to smile at the

sound

Of the oldfangled dance tunes and

each pair

Of youthful lovers swaying to and fro?

Only a dreamer, who was never there.

The spare language holds us on the verge of sorrow. The iambic pentameter recalls the rhythm of those youthful lovers -- the swaying to and fro of the dance floor. "Tea Dance at the Nautilus Hotel (1925)" ends with the information: "after a watercolor by Donald Justice." Sources of inspiration and influence are credited throughout Mezey's work. The poem "Evening Wind," for example, comes by way of "an etching by Edward Hopper": "Why then does she suddenly look aside / At a white window full of empty space / And curtains swaying inward? Does she sense / In darkening air the vast indifference / That enters in and will not be denied, / To breathe unseen upon her nakedness?"

Mezey's poetic indebtedness extends from friends through the origins of Roman elegy. His opening poem, "Dedication: for Donald Justice," combines the two; this piece is a retelling of Catullus's Carmina I, "Dedication to Cornelius." "To whom shall I give this skilled volume, / Rewritten a hundred times, and mulled, and polished?" is Mezey's version of "Cui dono lepidum novum libellum / arida modo pumice expolitum?" A great deal of Mezey's work is a reworking of such Roman models. "I call it gloss or variation for the sake of greater accuracy," Mezey explains in his foreword. "Translation is a mirage, if not misprision." Such gloss and variation is a worthy addition to our poetic inheritance: It keeps the tradition alive.

Samuel Johnson is said to have remarked that "in every volume of poems something good may be found"; he thus unwittingly put a bad idea in the head of a good many college English professors. Few people should write poetry, or at least few should publish it. Poetry in the last 40 years has tended toward egalitarianism and narcissism -- much of it is concerned with politics and personal expression, a poetics of me, myself, and I that displays little if any interest in tradition or form. But there is hope for those of us interested in issues of form, demonstrations of talent, and acknowledgements of the past. For every Adrienne Rich or August Kleinzahler there is a serious poet like Richard Wilbur, Geoffrey Hill, Dana Gioia, Donald Justice, Donald Hall, Edward Hirsch, Elizabeth Spires, Brad Leithauser, Daniel Mark Epstein, or Robert Mezey. "Poetry fettered fetters the human race," wrote William Blake.