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Strand's early work comes up empty Reviewed by Cynthia Haven |
Sunday, April 21, 2002
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The Story of Our Lives By Mark Strand KNOPF; 162 PAGES; $18Looking for Poetry Songs from the Quechua By Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Rafael Alberti; translated by Mark Strand KNOPF; 173 PAGES; $19Good poetry need not be approachable or fun, but it shouldn't be monotonous or dull, either. Too often, in the early poems of Mark Strand's "The Story of Our Lives" (1973) there's less than meets the eye. The republished volume includes some of Strand's most lauded early pieces, early experiments in Strand's particular brand of wry surrealism. Strand's poetry attempts to hover between reality and what is barely beyond it. He claims Borges' fiction as his inspiration, but Borges, though often learned and occasionally difficult, always delivers the goods. Much of Strand's early writing is, as was said unfairly of Bronson Alcott, "a train of fifteen railroad cars with one passenger." Perhaps it's unfair here, too, but how else can one explain empty cars like this one: She stood over him. She said she had watched him, that he had been trying to say something. He had nothing to say. He lay on the couch with his eyes open. Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep. Or this piece of lineated prose: I gaze upon the roast, that is sliced and laid out on my plate and over it I spoon the juices of carrot and onion. And for once I do not regret the passage of time. Yawn. In no other century but the 20th was a poet allowed to take so many lines to go nowhere. Such passages abound: "There was no reason to get up . . . If only he could say something,/ something that had the precision/ of his staying in bed . . ."; "You were staring at me./ I watched you until morning but you never spoke." Much of this material does not meet the more liberal standards of interesting prose, with its repetitive vaguenesses and emptinesses: "somethings," "there was," "there is," "not . . . not . . . nothing." Dated, rhetorical gimmicks crowd many of the poems. There's a lot of loose stuff and a lot of baloney. Strand's work is sprinkled with the memorable phrase, the occasionally striking observation, and those are often cited in reviews of his work. They are the single passengers among the railroad cars: "shells are the coffins of wind," "clouds have the look of rags torn and soiled with use," ". . . to stand in a space/ is to forget time,/ . . . to forget time/is to forget death." Fortunately, these are the kernels Strand picked up and carried on as he shucked off some of the earlier wanness and obsession with stillness, empty space and inertia. Strand has only gotten better; actually, such relief is presaged by the livelier poems of "The Late Hour" (1978), included in "The Story of Our Lives." It's a common saw that poets come to fruition early and tend to reiterate later in life. If so, his reiterations are at least more engaging and perhaps a little less pretentious. "Blizzard of One," which won a Pulitzer in 1999, is a case in point. No doubt many of Strand's early fans didn't like it for just that reason. But for bang for buck, try "Blizzard of One." It's a shame not to find something kinder to say about this earlier work; Strand is one of the most likable gods in the frequently surly poetic pantheon. These early, much- praised poems are not awful, but to read them in more than small doses is an eye-glazing experience. Too much of the earlier work is precisely what's given modern poetry a bad name. Just how much is clear from reading a few of the poems included in "Looking for Poetry," republished Strand translations from decades ago. With the eminent Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-1987), we enter a more spirited world in an airplane crash victim's description of his last day before "straight down I fall and am turned into news," or in "Looking for Poetry," in which Drummond offers a warning to young poets: Don't dramatize, don't invoke, don't question, don't waste time lying. Don't get upset . . . Don't bring up your sad and buried childhood . . . What faded was not poetry. What broke was not crystal. Quirky, whimsical, inventive Rafael Alberti (1902-1999), influenced heavily by Picasso, fills about half the volume. While often interesting, he is often obscure, especially when words and meaning part company without the actual fun of nonsense verse. Alberti often relies on arbitrary, meaningless oxymorons ("stone light of a star"), weird juxtapositions ("boneless light," "voiceless snow, blue-eyed perhaps, slow and with long hair") and abstractions for effect, with mind-numbing mixed metaphors. Try this: Now you need only wait for the appearance of those hidden springs that lead to the narrow hallways where light is discouraged by signs of death . . . Don't those narrow hallways that lead to the winter of a courtyard freeze the anguish of eternity that hisses through your blood? Still, we know too little of South America, and we can be grateful to Strand, who spent years there, for making its poetry better known (with a tip of the hat to Elizabeth Bishop's too-little-known anthology of Brazilian poetry, with her own translations of Drummond). The Quechua poems, in particular, are translated from Spanish versions of an Andean language that has no written form. Twice-removed from the original, and, more important, removed from the music that makes these "songs" go, they sound, to this ear, like folk songs everywhere -- simple lyrics of nature, love, longing and suffering. Cynthia Haven writes on poetry for the Book Review. She has written most recently for the Times Literary Supplement. |
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