The Lines of the Poets
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

This fall, several major American poets will publish collections of their lives’ work, books that will stand as important landmarks on the map of 20th-century American poetry. Richard Wilbur’s “Collected Poems 1943-2004” (Harcourt, 608 pages, $35) adds nearly two decades’ worth of writing to the poems of his Pulitzer Prize-winning “New and Collected Poems” of 1987, and compels a new appreciation of the sensual richness, formal elegance, and spiritual integrity of this major body of work. Richard Howard’s “Inner Voices: Selected Poems 1963-2003” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 440 pages, $35), discussed in this space last month, collects four decades of work from the man who could be called the best French poet in the English language. Mr. Howard’s dramatic monologues speak for, with, and against his literary demigods – Henry James, Robert Browning, Marcel Proust, and many more. Other fall books every poetry library should contain are Irving Feldman’s “Collected Poems 1954-2004” (Schocken, 464 pages, $28.50), and the new book length poem by Derek Walcott, “The Prodigal” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 112 pages, $20).
The season will also bring exciting new collections from a wide range of poets, from the well known and to the just starting out. Yusef Komunyakaa is a poet of great verbal energy and invention, whose quick, improvisatory style is anchored by intellectual power and moral seriousness. In “Taboo” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Mr. Komunyakaa has written what might be called an African-American rival and successor to Robert Lowell’s “History.” In this series of lyrics, all written in the same rapid, three-line stanza, Mr. Komunyakaa takes up figures, places, and events where Africa and the West have intersected – from Herodotus and ancient Egypt, to Baudelaire’s mistress Jeanne Duval, to Louis Armstrong:
In a corner of the naked
eye, your smile isn’t
a smile: confessions & curses
drip from your trumpet.
Like Lowell, whom he addresses in “Netherworlds,” Mr. Komunyakaa approaches his subjects from surprising angles, making each one the spark for an unpredictable, exciting, often oblique poem. “Taboo” leaves one eager for the next volumes of what Mr. Komunyakaa calls his “Wishbone Trilogy.”
Debora Greger’s “Western Art” (Penguin, 105 pages, $18), as its title promises, is a book saturated with culture. Bristling with epigrams, allusions, and descriptions of paintings, the book presents us with the poet as tourist, making her way through the treasures and landscapes of England, France, and Italy. This gives Ms. Greger many opportunities to exercise her gift for description – as in “Poetry and Sleep,” where she sees an elephant
Down on his back knees, the animal lowered,
a devout who baptized himself with a trunkful of dust and straw.
Ms. Greger is most compelling, however, when her visions are shadowed by her own experiences and emotions. In the book’s first section, especially, she offers a moving, bittersweet evocation of marital discord and loneliness:
What did he know
about mating for life? A swan could,
out of grief,
drag a sheep to water and hold it under.
W.G. Sebald is best known as a novelist, though his first creative work was a triptych of long, surreal poems, “After Nature.” Now comes “Unrecounted” (New Directions, 80 pages, $22.95), a book first published in Germany in a limited edition, in which Sebald’s elliptical “micropoems” are juxtaposed with lithographs by Jan Peter Tripp. The images – which capture one pair of human eyes after another, expressive of a shocking variety of emotions – set up a mysterious dialogue with the text, rather like the photos Sebald inserted into his novels. Sometimes Sebald’s poems – aphorisms, memories, or exclamations, broken into a few very short lines – remain inert, too private or random in their oddity. But at their best, they evoke the metaphysical bewilderment Sebald knew so well. When he writes “He will cover / you with his / plumage / & / under his wing then / you will rest,” Sebald could be looking forward to heavenly peace; but a glance at the accompanying image, of a man with burning pale eyes and a beaked nose, suggests something more like a bird of prey, threatening to snatch up a victim.
“The Displaced of Capital” (Chicago, 72 pages, $14) is only Anne Winters’ second book; but she already has a large reputation thanks to her first, “The Key to the City,” which appeared in 1986. Ms. Winters’s poetry is deeply rooted in New York City, and she wanders through its streets on the look-out for epiphanies:
The bus so close to the curb
that brush-drops of ebony paint stand out wetly, the sunlight
seethes with vibrations.
The best thing about Ms. Winters’ poetry is her tough, nervous language, dense with consonants, and well suited to her grimy vision of New York:
We’re aware of every nerve end of our tenement’s
hand-mortared Jersey brick, the plumbing’s
dripping dew-points, the electric running Direct,
and on each landing four hall-johns.
Unfortunately, Ms. Winters’ poetry is often damaged by her political rhetoric, in which the evils of capitalism are self-righteously denounced in a way reminiscent of 1930s Popular Frontstyle verse: “It says here / the old country’s ‘de-developing’ due to its mountainous / debt to the First World,” and so on.
Finally, this fall brings a very noteworthy debut. “The Optimist,” by Joshua Mehigan (Ohio University Press, 72 pages, $12.95), is remarkable for its mastery of form and of tone. Mr. Mehigan is Frost-like in the way he plays speech rhythms against the patterns of verse, creating a tense, deceptively simple music:
The fire transformed the bedspread into fire.
They slept a moment more but didn’t wake
until the gas was on them like a tongue,
and then they were asleep again.”
As these lines from “The Spectacle” show, Mr. Mehigan also has something of Frost’s delight in darkness; many of his poems offer the uncomfortable surprise that Poe called the most important element of poetry. In all of his beautifully composed (in both senses) poems, Mr. Mehigan
conjures the uncanniness of
a distant place,
of ordinary lives, remembered slant.