| Find Literary Events |
|
Chronicle Book Club |
|
Chronicle Book Review |
| Best-Sellers |
| Bay TV's Bookmark |
| Book Review Archive |
 |
| Gate Sections |
|
Home |
|
Today's News |
|
Sports |
|
Entertainment |
|
Technology |
|
Live Views |
|
Traffic |
|
Weather |
|
Health |
|
Business |
|
Bay Area Travel |
|
Columnists |
|
Classifieds |
|
Conferences |
|
Search |
|
Index |
 |
| Food Movies Music & Nightlife Performance Art Events Books TV Radio |
|
| ||
|
A Baby Boomer in His Serious Years Poet observes time's passage with erudition and wit REVIEWED BY Cynthia Haven |
Sunday, April 16, 2000
|
|
|
| ||
NORTH STREETBy Jonathan Galassi HarperCollins; 86 pages; $23
Jonathan Galassi's first book of poetry, ``Morning Run,'' was published in 1988; his second, ``North Street,'' this spring. That's a long, 12-year stretch between two slim volumes. What fills the missing years is a lot of Italian poet Eugenio Montale. Galassi received critical praise in 1998 for his carefully annotated, 625- page edition of ``Collected Poems 1920-1954,'' which followed two books of Montale's selected essays and poetry that Galassi published in the '80s. (Galassi is currently working on the ``Diario Postumo.'') This is all the more impressive if one knows that Galassi is also one of the most powerful and influential men in the East Coast literary establishment, the editor in chief at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, the nation's pre-eminent publishing house for poetry. And besides being a great literary editor, he is also president of the American Academy of Poets. His is a salutary lesson in discipline, but what of the poems at hand? Galassi's lines are filled with musical virtues, sometimes delirious with alliteration and internal rhyme. Galassi said in a recent interview that Montale helped him become ``richer and freer with language.'' ``Paradoxically, as I learned more formal control, I learned to be more creative within the form,'' he said. Consequently, he flirts with traditional form and, in several notable poems, even marries it. This is especially so in the dizzy, ditzy ``North Street Dithyrambs'' section. In lines like these, it is best to suspend sense and let the sound roll over you: Open-ended like the swallow's swoon, swift swerve in the syrupy light of high noon . . . Not that these poems are a pure sensory wallow, far from it. Some will undoubtedly find this collection overly clever, urbane, intellectual, risk-averse. If you are looking for what critic Marjorie Perloff calls the ``nervous, ironic, lyrical and obsessive rhythms'' of Montale, you won't find them. ``North Street'' reflects a different sensibility -- the highly intelligent, witty, erudite, over-achieving Baby Boomer, serious in his concerns, committed to his family and friends, grave in his observance of the hairline cracks brought about by time, the years that will bring ``Total Maturity.'' The trick is how to amortize remorse, desire, and dread. Eyes ahead, companions: Life is Now. The serious years are opening ahead. Those lines are from ``Turning Forty,'' initially set against ``the barroom mirror lit up with our wives.'' It's an obvious sequel to the earlier book's ``Our Wives,'' which closes with the same words in its penultimate line. Where the earlier poem's narrator mused, ``And yet who believes that what he's living now IS his adventure,/ that the beer we're drinking is our lives?'' and ``history thrives without us,'' the later poem observes more disquietingly, ``now every step seems haunted by the future,/ not only ours'' and watches the generations pass: . . . for the young the world is always new. Maybe that's what dates us worst of all and saves them: What we'll miss they never knew. In such observations, Galassi has a gift for the quotable, resigned aphorism: ``You let the fire burn low and contemplate/ that great unfinished work of art, your life.'' Or this one: ``No one ever claimed that life is fair;/ what comes after is a rougher sport.'' Wistfulness and quiet regret permeate many of the poems, such as ``The Canaan Rainbow,'' in which the poet recalls ``the greatest thing I've ever seen,'' a Canaan rainbow in a parking lot, interrupted by cranky children and a premature departure for home: ``and if I had it all to do again/ (I know I won't; it doesn't work that way),/ I'd stand my ground as long as there was daylight.'' Several others cross over into pensive nostalgia, leaving the reader somewhat bemused by Galassi's disappointed expectations. Perhaps it's simply that, for his generation, rock 'n' roll didn't change the world. Instead, he fell into an accustomed groove, however elite and privileged his Harvard- and Cambridge-educated groove may appear to be. Or maybe he's simply humbled by his work with Montale, one of the foremost poets of the 20th century. Galassi's poems are occasionally marred by easy cliched effects and gimcracks: ``waiting for rain/ waiting for rain/ waiting/ waiting/ waiting for rain.'' Journalists do this, yes, but one always hopes that poets drink from finer casks. But that's a quibble. ``North Street's'' poems are as smooth and polished as stones from a riverbed. They persuade by their quiet, understated elegance and discipline -- and by the carefully distilled joy of their finer passages, which, in accordance with Tennyson's dictum, wear their learning lightly, like a flower. Cynthia Haven is a Stanford author and journalist. |
|
· Printer-friendly version
· Email this article to a friend
|
