Subversive histories

American Poetry Review, The, Sep/Oct 1999 by Clark, Tom

Vita Nova

Louise Gluck The Ecco Press; 64 pages; $22

Jackstraws

Charles Simic Harcourt Brace; 96 pages; $22

Overtime: Selected Poems

Philip Whalen. Edited by Michael Rothenberg, with an introduction by Leslie Scalapino Penguin; 31I pages; $16.95

The Lost Land

Eavan Boland Norton; 67 pages; $21

The Triumph of Love

Geoffrey Hill Houghton Mifflin; 96 pages; $22

Later Auden

Edward Mendelson

Farrar, Straus & Giroux 559 pages; $30

"Life is very weird, no matter how it ends,/ very filled with dreams." Poet Louise Gluck's haunting, arresting Vita Nova, a book of trial and tears, heartbreak, resignation and renewal, is also a book of dreaming.

Glick's poetic sequence begins and ends in parallel framing dreams, and in between follows a drifting narrative course out of which instructive dreams appear like floating islands in soundless fog. With unmisgiving trust this poet finds both faith and value in a kind of wakeful second-seeing that re-interprets ancient mythic fables with the same analytic intensity it applies to personal dream symbolism, insistently relating the lessons of both sorts of dreams to life in the "real" world.

"I dreamed this:/ can waking take back what happened to me?" asks Gluck's speaker in "Castile," a poem about a dream lover encountered beneath a Spanish orange tree. "Does it have to happen in the world to be real?" For this poet, a belated Romantic, dreams are events in reality: they alter things, you can't take them back.

That point is made beautifully in the opening poem of the sequence, recounting an expansive dream of youth and springtime that leaves its trace as an emotional sign in the waking world. "When I woke up, I realized I was capable of the same feeling . . . the moment/ vivid, intact, having never been/ exposed to light, so that I woke elated, at my age/ hungry for life."

In dreams begin responsibilities, the poet W B. Yeats once suggested. For poets dreams have always beckoned and tantalized, but Gluck goes further and discovers belief there. "I dreamed everything, I gave myself/ completely and for all time." Who else writes with that kind of over-the-top commitment to vaporish states in these late, undeceived days?

"A witness not a theorist" of her inner life, Gluck examines her dream material with unsparing honesty ("I hate/ when your own dreams treat you as stupid"), and inscribes it with a quiet, at times painful candor, willing to suspend judgment and entertain stubborn unclarities to find the epiphanies she obsessively seeks. The complexity and multiplicity of dream-signifying emerge in passages of shimmering, luminous depth, as when the under-meanings of her springtime dream percolate up to the waking surface: "Surely spring has been returned to me, this time/ not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet/it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly."

What imagistic coloration this sequence has appears ethereal and ghostly, a light of nether-worlds and spook-dimensions, as viewed-to quote from a dream-poem about a burning house that turns into a funeral pyre-by one who has "walked out of the fire/ into a different world-maybe/ the world of the dead, for all I know" ("Inferno"). The poems' movement feels like a gradual descent into the self, where verse music grows eerily quiet, reflective, as if stilled by inward dream silences. And the curious oracular utterances that periodically interrupt the meditative discourse to interrogate and admonish the poet-speaker seem also to emanate from dreams.

Remote, disembodied presences, ominous yet Muse-like, Gluck's unseen dream masters turn up now as stern interlocutors, now as deep-seeing mentors and guides. Their inquisition-it is, of course, the poet talking to herself-has an abrupt, immediate urgency about it that yields a call-andresponse structure: "Why are you afraid?" "But do you think you're free?" "Who are you and what is your purpose?" "Do you regret your life?"

The challenge to answer her inner questioners honestly drives the poet into terse furies of starkly propositional statement, abdicating conventional writing-school wisdom about avoiding abstraction. Show don't tell is the rule, but in her telling passion, this poet is never afraid to leap aboard a Platonistic Pegasus, "my horse Abstraction,/ silverwhite, color of the page,/ of the unwritten."

For Gluck, nakedly abstract statement provides a distancing instrument, a way not so much to evade the mundane facts of her worldly dramas as to lift off from them. There's a dead or lost husband or lover lurking in here somewhere, along with the grieving speaker who mourns him, but all the potentially vulgar details of a fuzzily-outlined confessional realm seem to fall away when the writing ascends on forbidden wings of abstraction to a curious generalizing tone, at once strangely impersonal and weirdly authoritative, as if the poet were appointed to speak truths not just of her own life but of everyone's.

Among the resulting landscapes of unexplained absences and fictive shapes, a shadowy central poetic telling occurs. In vague mythic underworlds of reverie old stories come back to life, acquiring fresh meanings in Gluck's nuanced, deflected reading. These tales of wronged women and faithless paramours, lost girls tumbling back into hell and jilted queens dying brutally for love, carry us all the way down to "the dark existing ground" that underlies Vita Nova. Eurydice and Dido take on a new tragic heroism in their timeless haunted world, where an eternally narcissistic Orpheus always forgets love and an incurably adventuring Aeneas forever sails off to his imperialist destiny, founding Rome while leaving an abandoned but resigned Queen of Carthage to "accept suffering as she accepted favor" ("The Queen of Carthage").