Rampant (review)

In answering objections that the poems of Horace and Goethe seem to break off in many directions, Schopenhauer writes: "But here the logical sequence is intentionally neglected, in order that the unity of the fun-damental sensation and mood expressed in them may take its place; and precisely in this way does this unity stand out more clearly, since it runs like a thread through the separate pearls, and brings about the rapid change of the objects of contemplation." What he is talking about is the nature of perception, a poetic logic, the kind of associative thinking Marvin Bell has perfected in his famous "Dead Man" poems and evident here in poems like "View," a poem structured by its images' relationships to water. As with those Dead Man poems and several others in this astonishingly smart and evocative book, each line of the poem is a sentence: the result is a vision that gives each image its own authority and yet ties it into the inevitable movement of the whole poem. The effect is a poetry of process that informs the entire book, a sense of the poet creating a representation of the world in order to understand what the world is supposed to represent in the first place, as Schopenhauer would have it. In "Meditation" Bell describes how one creates a room from "bare" essentials:

                    You do this
solely by the power of your inner eye.
Project, also, on the wall, one owl,
at times wise and penitential on a branch,
at others calculating the swoop to home
while a young rabbit drips from its talons.

For Schopenhauer, each poem uncovers a logic of its own, a logic not aimed at a final result as much as the process of uncovering itself. It is an endless process, as Bell suggests in "Ashes Poetica":

Corpuscles of light descend from darkness, randomly, quietly,
and are able to penetrate the exposed eye
where they fall into bits and pieces, trying to form a picture.

In "Persistent Memory," for example, the poem moves from a "greasy spoon" to a bookstore, Martin Luther, Noah, a garage full of dolls, a memory of a boy on a trampoline and other associations that are juxtaposed like the boy who is "up in the air / and won't come down." Playing off Dali's famous title, the poem suggests a weave of associations that is always provisional, and indeed the whole book, as it moves geographically and historically, echoes that weave. Perhaps the central image for this sophisticated sense of the poem is Gaudi's unfinished cathedral ("Winter in Stiges").

The result, as Bell describes it in the "Coda" to the long poem that ends this book, is a "metaphysical seesaw, " what Schopenhauer called "a mingled state of mind." "Which is the happy light, dawn or dusk," the poet asks in one poem. And so the book is filled with images of edges, reversals, approaches, thresholds, everyday images that become loaded with metaphysical freight. In "He Sees Himself" the speaker confronts a mirror and "the front of himself but not the back" which is seen by the "other" in which the speaker exists like a dream, and, in a reversal of perspective, "he sees my back reflected in the glass. / As if I were moving away as I came closer." In "The New World" this seesaw effect extends to time: the poem begins with a description of classical Greek ships approaching and ends with two contemporary boys taking a boat to "set out for the horizon." Another poem, "The Castle," is set in the Prague of the distant past of "jesters" and magic, the "tanks" of a more recent time and the present as the speaker who is "slumping / into a doze." An extension of this sort of perception leads to a number of poems that deal with the relationship between art and reality. In "Nature Morte" the poet hears a plane too low, one that shakes the houses, but at the same time the moment is...