Very Close and Very Slow by Judith Hemschemeyer (review)

style so convoluted that it is comprehensible to very few persons under the rank of Ph.D. If we place a copy of Hartman's The Fate of Reading and a copy of Cliff's Notes side by side, many of us reach the conclusion that die main business of criticism is to steer a middle course between two irresponsibilities , both of which are extremes. One is the arcane elitism emerging in the 1970's, and the other is the previous decade at its popularistic worst. As literary persons, we should not embrace everything in the world, nor should we turn our backs on it. In making a series of negative comments on Literary Meaning and Augustan Values, I have not meant to imply that there is nothing worthwhile in this volume. Well-organized and thoroughly learned, it furnishes a number of original insights into major eighteenth-century works and some valid criticisms of present-day tendencies in scholarship. More importandy, the book is thought-provoking; and if one of die functions of criticism is not so much to be "right" as to provoke thought, then Ehrenpreis has made a substantial contribution. Were it not for his propensities toward isolationism and reductionism, his contribution might have been even more substantial. PETER THORPK Peter Thorpe is professor of English at the University of Colorado at Denver. He has written a book an^ numerous articles on eighteenth-century English literature and satire. VERY CLOSE AND VERY SLOW BY IUDlTH HEMSCHEMEYER (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1975. 69 pages, $6.00). The description of the Wesleyan Poetry Program is refreshingly devoid of special qualifications regarding age, sex, ethnic origin, sexual preference, and other indices of quality other than literary merit. On the dust jacket of each book in the series the publisher announces: Manuscripts for consideration are welcomed from anyone. There are no restrictions of form or style. They are read by the four members of the especial editorial board that makes publishing recommendations, distinguished poets and critics, whose single criterion of acceptance is excellence. Such a simple and straightforward procedure over the years has given us poetry from John Ashbery, Josephine Miles, Robert BIy, Marge Piercy, James 196BOOK REVIEWS Wright, Philip Levine, Clarence Major, Vassar Miller, Hyam Plutzik, David Ignatow, to name just a few of the "Wesleyan Poets," a rubric which serves to designate no other characteristic these writers share. Judith Hemschemeyer has the distinction of being twice a Wesleyan poet; her first book, / Remember The Room Was Filled With Light, appeared in 1972 and now wc have Very Close and Very Slow. The title is drawn from a cinematic image: As usual I panned the faces very close and very slow. The faces Hemschemeyer pans across slowly and closely in this volume are etched deeply in the haunted places of her pysche. Watching them closely, "Certain Themes Emerge," as she tides one of her poems—the diemes of death, suicide, abortion, broken and fragmented relationships. The cinematic view of the past life recollected in diis volume is unrelentingly traumatic, and die poetry seems to be written out of a cathartic necessity. The third section of the book particularly, which contains poems about the suicide of a close friend, reveals how an event of this sort saturates one's consciousness to the exclusion of everything else. First there is the torturous process of trying to discover reasons for the suicide: why did she do it; why didn't we know about it? Skinned by that pure self-loathing diat fell on you like knives, you moved among us, aping our ease. How long had you been faking it? Now, I make each gesture, every word a clue. Then there is the stunned clinging to life itself—a new awareness of its preciousness: I found myself dragging hoses watering every inch of this huge lawn over and over day after perfect day obsessed unable to let one more thing one single blade of grass die ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW197 Then the realization of the simple, irreversible finality of the act: The girl who fed The swans last winter is dead And its gradual slipping into the landscape of the remainder of our lives: Already...