Victory, and: The River of Forgetfulness (review)

John Burt's new book Victory and Rachel Hadas's The River of Forgetfulness would surely both appeal to the general, non-academic reader that poets have imagined since before Yeats's Connemara fisherman, though it seems unlikely that these books will find the wide readership they deserve. Victory delivers something we see rarely in contemporary poetry: sustained narrative poems with a focus on character and ethics, grounded in carefully researched historical reality. Most of Victory consists of three poems in sections, each of which describes or fictionalizes an historical moment on the periphery of war: an American diplomat seeking treaty negotiations with Napoleon before the War of 1812, a South Carolina politician trying to justify or excuse slavery on the eve of the Civil War, and a woman reconstructing the U-boat attack in which her father's Liberty ship was destroyed. A six-page narrative, "The Passing of the Armies," opens the collection and sets the terms for what follows: the Union general Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, returning home with his troops after accepting Lee's surrender at Appomattox, has a nightmare memory of the Confederate retreat after Gettysburg, then awakes to discover that the night's camp is built on a three-year-old battlefield still littered with the poorly buried corpses of men from his own regiment. Chamberlain reflects on the dark costs of war, quoting a fragment of Thucydides and a mercilessly cynical piece of Athenian oratory; this theme is never far from the poems in Victory. This introductory poem also speaks of the way history continually returns to inform the present—not only in Chamberlain's classical analogies and the memory brought up by his dream, but also in the literal resurfacing of the dead soldiers at his unfortunate campsite. This uncanny return of the historical seems to shape Burt's method itself, which gives forgotten historical moments an opportunity to speak to the present.

Burt has always had an archivist's eye for the memorable minor historical moment and a novelist's sensitivity for characterization: from the dusty orts of American history, he draws smart, careful, often troubling portraits of forgotten characters in their defining moments. These moments are often points of quiet tension or pained recognition, and even in the midst of the central poem's U-boat battle, the emphasis is Captain O'Leary's recognition of his own doom. Burt is clearly interested not only in characterization but also in character, as each of his central figures is tested to reveal his troubles and flaws. Burt juxtaposes the diplomat Joel Barlow's jovial vanity with the terrible deprivations of Napoleon's Russian campaign; Burt's South Carolina politician David Harper damns himself in his desperate rationalizations of his marriage for money, his infidelities, secession, and the institution of slavery. Harper is clearly a villain, repellent on several levels, and Burt makes him fascinating in his selfishness (and self-deception) without excusing his villainy with any extenuating circumstances. Harper becomes a kind of warning against the capacity of the powerful to justify the terrible means that support their personal ends.

Burt does all this in blank verse as practiced and fluent as any in contemporary poetry. If his idiomatic Frost shades once or twice toward Wordsworthian sonority, the effect seems designed to suggest the voices of his nineteenth-century characters; more often, Burt's steady, end-stopped pentameters simply have the sound of wisdom. Here is Burt's David Harper, for example, ruminating:

Ambition is not lullabied with praise. Its wakeful genius, spurred and stayed with doubt, Saves it alike from joy and from despair. It is not hobbled by another's scruple . . . It stifles in the moment of repose.

Or here is Captain O'Leary's daughter, in "Victory," looking over pictures of dilapidated, decommissioned Liberty ships:

They wear out just like us, she thought, they leave In death, like us, no trace but junk and filth. Better to be sunk than come to that.

The...