In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviews 253 While some still consider this “poet of madness” a confessional poet, the confessional categorization is ignored in favor of Roethke’s broader affinities with the Romantics. In Roethke’s attempt to bring together analysis and art, personal elements of the unconscious are framed by a larger mythic pattern, particularly in The Lost Son which is central to understanding the body of Roethke’s work. Parini, himself a poet, is worth quoting here: “It is as if the poet placed a sheet of rice paper over the archetypal pattern of a face, but drew his own features into the portrait” (page 84). The final chapter opens with a quote from Nietzsche, copied by Roethke in his notebooks: “To have paced out the whole circumference of modern consciousness, to have explored every one of its recesses — this is my ambition, my torture and my bliss.” This book show to what degree Roethke accom­ plished this, how he read, absorbed and incorporated into hiswork the Roman­ tics, modern psychology and the work of many mystics and poets. The book is more than a study of Roethke’s poetry. Although lacking a concise chronolgy, it includes previously unpublished letters, notes and drafts of poems. It also serves as a handbook for today’spoets. Scholars, writers and general readers should find their esteem and understanding of Roethke broadened or reinforced. NANCY McCLEERY, Anchorage, Alaska A Glass Face in the Rain: New Poems. By William Stafford. (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1982. 126 pages, $12.95.) At the beginning of A Glass Face in the Rain Stafford sends up a smoke signal to readers “on a parallel way,” because something about how “sunlight happens to them, / helps us to hold the strange, enigmatic days / in line for our own living.” To establish kinship with his readers is very important to Stafford. All of his collections of poems have appeal for a variety of readers: the browsing fellow'-poet witnessing style and technique; the environmentalist looking for reinforcement; the casual reader looking for quotable lines — all these will find gold in this new collection, and each may find a different Stafford. Only with sustained, sequential study from beginning to end will the full stature of the poet-pilgrim and the teacher of poets emerge. Such a reading will reveal that each of the five parts of the collection has its own introductory poem italicized for emphasis. Part one, “A Touch on your Sleeve,” opens with an allegory about a litter of puppies, “rolling, whin­ ing, happy and blind.” Are they analogous to us? The introduction to part two, “Things that Come,” admonishes the reader: “You think my poems are soft? That there isn’t a wolf in them?” The “Things that Come,” in this section are frequently grim moments of truth, portentous foreshadowings of doom. 254 Western American Literature In part three, “Revelations,” the reader is told, “For the rest of your life I will stand here, / reaching across.” And one of the “Revelations,” the title poem, “A Glass Face in the Rain,” develops a dramatic monologue wherein the reader may behold his own dying and his ghostly image, “a glass face, invisible but still and real, / all night outside in the rain.” In part four are poems of reminiscence beginning with “once in the 40’s,” a love poem recalling a winter night in Montana, a lonely road; they were cold but brave and as they “trudged along” they told each other, “We’d leave the others and find / a night like this, whatever we had to give, / and no matter how far, to be so happy again.” “Confessor,” also included in this section, may well be one of Stafford’s poetic landmarks ranking with “Elegy,” (on the death of his father) and “Requiem,” (on the death of his mother), and “Letter From Oregon,” or “Traveling Through the Dark.” As the title implies, the poet plays a sacerdotal role: We go forward by this quiet sharing, They one way, I another. I am their promise: no one else is going to know. Part five, title “The Color That Really Is,” comprises, in Stafford’swords, poems made up of “These trancelike/events that I’ve turned...

pdf

Share