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Richard Wilbur -- in Verse and Conversation REVIEWED BY Cynthia L. Haven |
Sunday, August 6, 2000
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MAYFLIES New Poems and Translations By Richard Wilbur Harcourt; 80 pages; $22
RICHARD WILBURIn Conversation With Peter Dale Between the Lines (P.O. Box 213, Stonington, CT 06378-0213); 96 pages; $19.95 paperback
Every year or so, among the New Yorker's often humdrum but trendy offerings of poetry, one runs across something that astonishes, as happened a year or two ago with this: In somber forest, when the sun was low, I saw from unseen pools a mist of flies In their quadrillions rise And animate a ragged patch of glow With sudden glittering . . . It is reassuring to know that enchantment still makes it into general-interest magazines but especially pleasing to discover this poem again as the title piece of Richard Wilbur's new collection, ``Mayflies.'' It's pleasing also that the 79-year-old poet is not resting on his many laurels. His ``New and Collected'' won a Pulitzer (his second) in 1988, leaving some to assume, reasonably perhaps, that it would be the capstone of a long career. Now we have this luminous coda as well. Not that everything in this collection is entirely new. The sharp-eyed will recognize Wilbur's brilliant terza rima translation of Dante's ``Canto 25'' from Daniel Halpern's collection of the ``Inferno'' rendered by 20 contemporary poets. His Baudelaire translations are regathered from a 1955 edition of ``Flowers of Evil'' that was excluded from earlier collections. Subtract the translations from the Bulgarian, Romanian and another of his smooth, liquid translations of Moliere (this one from ``Amphitryon'') -- and ``Mayflies'' is a slim collection indeed. But what's there is choice. Wilbur is arguably America's greatest living poet, but that particular honor fits uneasily with our egalitarian, multiethnic age. Robert McPhillips put it bluntly: Wilbur's ``are the virtues of a gentile cultural elite, their breeding ground the English Departments of the '50s with the Fulbright overseas scholarships and their valorization of wit, irony and complexity, the legacy of the New Critics.'' True, but in our multicultural times, it could be argued that these virtues are a cultural artifact of a bygone era and therefore less threatening than perhaps they once appeared. And in the modern canon, surely there is a special corner for Wilbur's elegant, seamless verse about human nature, love and betrayal, or for his witty, contemplative looks at nature. And such lush language, too: ``rosettes of lichen,'' ``ferns of toasted gold,'' and mayflies that ``seemed the weavers of some cloth of gold, / Or the fine pistons of some bright machine.'' Surely there is a place, too, for the sane, equable poet taking on the notoriously difficult subject of a happy marriage, in this case in ``For C.,'' a poem to his wife of 58 years: Still, there's a certain scope in that long love Which constant spirits are the keepers of, And which, though taken to be tame and staid, Is a wild sostenuto of the heart . . . Inevitably, Wilbur colors all with his joy in wordplay, whether in obscure or inventive word choices or simply recalling the ``delectable names of harsh places'' (``that smooth wave of cello-sound, Mojave'') that reminds us ``(t)hat there is beauty bleak and far from ours, / Great reaches where the Lord's delighting mind, / Though not inhuman, ponders other things.'' Wilbur is a determinedly metrical poet. ``Mayflies'' is replete with heroic couplets reminiscent of his Moliere translations. His pristine rhymes are also in abundance; he sticks rather stubbornly for ear-pleasing, bald-faced rhymes, rather than a la mode eye-rhymes, slant rhymes and assonance. ``Mayflies'' is a book to keep, reread, ponder and even memorize. We can only hope this singular poet has years ahead for more remarkable codas. For those who want to know more about Wilbur, perhaps 22 pages of bibliography will help. If not, they can settle for the 49-page interview in the same book, ``Richard Wilbur: In Conversation With Peter Dale.'' It's been fashionable to argue that the poet is explicated in his or her works, but the Britain-based Between the Lines series (www.interviews-with-poets.com) challenges that view. The series has so far interviewed, among others, Thom Gunn, Donald Hall and Anthony Hecht -- with Seamus Heaney, Donald Justice and more in the offing. Dale's interview was conducted back and forth by mail. This published interview, sometimes tricked out to look like a conversation (``Sorry to interrupt . . .''), shows the limitation of the form when one can't follow up with pointed questions. One small example among a welter: When the Amherst- and Harvard-educated Wilbur mentions that as a young man he had traveled all over the United States ``in freight trains, sleeping on roadsides, in jails, and in hobo jungles,'' we wait in vain for the necessary interrogator's interruption. And sometimes Dale intrudes. Dale is a poet, not a journalist, and the seams show, as well as the strengths. The strengths, then: Dale picks up speed in the detailed discussions of Wilbur's poetry and prosody. For example, his discussion of the ``Mayflies'' collection (``slowly done, as always'') explains a puzzling line break in one of Wilbur's poems as an antic attempt to portray a chipmunk vanishing around a rock. As expected, there are grandfatherly pearls. On poetry: ``Good poems, I think, release us from inarticulateness, which is a great misery . . .'' On America: ``which I love for its richness, variety, energy, and residual rawness. It seems to me that the United States, though not a coherent culture, is a sufficient one . . .'' Or, ``Insanity can seem pretty exciting when viewed from the outside, but to the insane it's a cramped, repetitive, self-bound condition . . .'' Wilbur and Dale mercifully avoid the gossip that seems to be a staple of many poetry interviews (barring one bizarre anecdote about bailing Delmore Schwartz out of jail). Wilbur is generous to fellow poets. It's only to be expected from a poet who has been called as honored as he is honorable. Cynthia L. Haven has written for Civilization, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. |
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