Poets from the Anvil Press

community than the sophisticated, established art. This is an extremely narrow and disabling assumption. All art, whether high or low, emerges out of an inevitable tension between the subject-matter and the way it is seen and consequently demands attention to the act of 'making', of fabrication, that Aristotle regarded as central to creative activity. But to say this is not to slur over the differences in the quality of making, for it goes without saying that, as Aristotle indicates, the human factor is as important in the mimetic act as any other. So that critical theory while being fully alive to the formal sophistication of the one shall be flexible enough to mediate into the spontaneous appeal of the other. In this way it may be possible to apprehend the continuity of artistic endeavour through history and situate contemporary manifestations of the art impulse within a more general total pattern. There is a historical pattern in art as much as there is in the evolution of mankind. We are always at the intersection of the past and the future, never static in the present moment. Art speaks to our sense of history as well as to our Utopian dreams. But more than that it brings forth what Marx calls the 'slumbering potentialities' of nature into significant human forms. Today when so much destruction and violence lie round the corner it is imperative to remind ourselves with the late Auden, Still unachieved is Jen, the Truly Human. And it is in this direction that Baxandall's anthology, in spite of its shortcoming, helps. M. L. Raina POETS FROM THE ANVIL PRESS Avebury, Richard Burns. $4.00. To Have Eyes, Geoffrey Holloway. $1.00. Death is a Pulpit, Peter Levi. $3.50. Life is a Platform, Peter Levi. $5.00. The Holly Queen, Sally Purcell. $4.00. In Witness. Robert Shaw. $1.00. (Anvil Press publications are distributed in the United States by Serendipity Books, 1790 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, California 94709. The two paperback volumes listed above, Holloway's To Have Eyes and Shaw's In Witness, are available individually and with ten other booklets as a boxed set entitled Twelve Poets and costing $12.00.) In a lyric entitled "Going to School" Geoffrey Holloway, whom I think technically the most accomplished of the Anvil Press poets here reviewed, has the speaker close his paean to a child's spontaneously poetic imagination by describing how he "finds records of her breezy coming/ constellated on the green: magnolia-petals: butterflies/ that broached a season's nectar-vats/ to settle on its wavy grass sensuous profundities." "Sensuous profundities" seems to me an apt definition not only of what Holloway strives for but of what lyric verse should be. While the belief in the child as natural poet has provided matter for great poems at least since Blake's Songs of Innocence, Holloway gives it a fresh turn, focusing in "Going to School*' on the intimacy between father and daughter, and proceeding from the father's observations of his daughter's startling responses to their world. The first voice we hear is hers: 157 "It's smashing early-on, clean and lonely!" Then: "I like it with The car-wireless, music swishes up and down The hTTle hills!" Then: "The waTerweeds - - green straw!" And: "I don'T look aT The sun in prayers; it makes me sneeze!' These assertions have some of the quality of metaphysical wit. But it is more than wit Holloway would have us find in them. For their context demands we take them not as felicitous inventions of the poet but ¡is real utterances by his daughter, "Going to School" grows out of gleanings from daily experience - - which is what Holloway means by "sensuous profundities." The poem's title alludes both to the impressions the child collects on her way and to the value her telling of them holds for her poet-father. He too goes to school, by assimilating the unique perceptions his daughter shares with him, as attuned readers may assimilate perceptions poets have formed into poems. Poetry, whether bom of the child's wonder or the poet's labor, expands consciousness. Or as Holloway puts it in...