Unique Universality

The Masaccio fresco from the Carmine Chapel in Florence, showing an angel with a sword driving Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, is an appropriate cover image for Angels in Flames, James Scully’s recent book of poems. The author, a veteran of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the States, lived with his family in Chile in 1973–1974 and allowed his apartment to be a safe house for local opponents of Colonel Pinochet, who called themselves the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria.

Many of these poems recount the lives and deaths of political prisoners, but they are not all political rants. They are mostly imagistic, imaginative, and deeply felt. An example is the poem “Isa Mar” for Isabel Margarita Letelier, in the second stanza of which we read:

     “Isabel, what do you hear? Your husband’s marooned: off Tierra del   Fuego

    on Isla Dawson. It’s a small world, smaller than the moon

Its tiny fires illumine no one.     Day and night       Watchtowers

  train their sights into the concentration camp, others

  stare at the sea. No flushed human face swims into view.

    But welcome   penguins like ambassadors, who keep their distance.

Then again, we have “Boxcars,” a poem that takes on so many Holocausts that it empties itself of meaning. Looking for a pure lyric, I find “Walking with Deirdre,” whose evocation of a cold spring morning is lovely: “Once, from underfoot / a ruffed grouse flew up like a terrified heartbeat….” Why end, then, with a line like this? “Deirdre, bountiful daughter, we’ll never die out.” This tone of complacency crushes the poem entirely.

There are two long poems toward the beginning of the book that strike me as fully accomplished poems. “Wild Trees” has such lines as, “we came upon / the obvious: crabapples, / blood clots of rusted fruit,” such images as crows being seen as “flying black rags,” and such oddities as a childhood reminiscence of a parochial school where the nuns concealed the inquisitional history of the order of St. Dominic. It ends with a sort of ecstatic description of a statue of the Virgin—“that Mary, she was one wild tree,” and “Mary, in whom / all questions died before they could come to mind.” This poem interweaves wonderful observations of country (“the placid / strangeness of cows congregated / at the farthest, lowest corner of a pasture”) with a Giotto fresco of Dominican friars who look like the cows. Woven too with the sense of being lied to that is experienced by parochial school students, who are nonetheless mollified by the benign and silent statue of Mary, who could never have countenanced the cruelty of the Domini canes—the dogs of God—Dominican inquisitors who felt they were purging the church of heretics.

“Babble” is another long but fully sustained poem about the poet’s senile mother in various stages of disarray. Pan and Socrates and the origin of words creep into this poem, but its strength is in “the Hazel thing / that was somebody’s mother / with 3 pocketbooks on one arm.”

Another pleasure to be dug out of this long book is the presence of some translations of Quechua poems and of a few poems of Joseph Brodsky’s. All in all, this is a book that recapitulates and re-enacts one entire life that may have tried hard to be universal but will be remembered as unique.