The Pleasures of Modernism

America Reeve continuedfrom previous page a usually unacknowledged point ofview. "Grendel," for example, addresses the fiend, its predatory history underwater and above, sums up the agon with Beowulf from a surface point of view, as if it had occurred in real time in a real place, [and we] bring up your head that stares witless from the whites of its eyes, its ears stone to the voice in the reeds murmuring prophecies of the undying dragon and unending wars. Diction has become simpler, basically colloquial but still under the tension of the dominant metaphor of which one side is literal and one is figurative: literally, there is a stone among the reeds, and, figuratively, being one of the actors in the drama, the villainous victim, like the mortal victor, does not know the rest ofthe play. We do. Its future has become ourpast, and we have become it. That is, since in present time we cannot know that there will be an end to war or that all dragons will die, we experience war as "unending " and dragons as "undying." The language ofthe poem has made the knowledge available. Sophistication of mind drives Siegel's ironic simplicity and the persuasiveness of his undiminished faith in such goodness as there is. Ticks and spiders, wolves and giraffes—the creatures come with skeletons and without—but the giant panda, who says, "In the white mist ofmorning I find my place," offers a gloss on the sensual delight in the beauty ofmind, much like the seductive power of mathematical elegance: I sit, the world circling about me, holding the secret between tongue and palate, the sweetness of nothing, above which the mind shimmers like a forest of silks. The beautiful may have nothing to do with goodness , "The Serpent Speaks" reminds us as it starts out faux-confessionally from itself: "I am another vine / in the great democracy of vines." History is a string of boxcars; the overstuffed centuries one after another leap the tracks; the serpent knows the end but, Cassandra-like, is unheeded; so, tail in mouth, it swallows itself in its own nanowing circle until it vanishes and everything vanishes with it. Part 2 consists of fifteen sonnets and a double sonnet of portraits of Old Testament figures who created the New. Siegel begins with a Bulgakov-like Jesus, "the artisan's son turned wonderworker," who the neighbors said "didn't come to much," a man whose plain life masked a spiritual transcendence. There's a demure Mary accepting the genius of the Annunciation, a homesick prodigal, an astonished and bemused Lazarus, a fiercely competitive Judas, Thomas who can't take his eyes offhim—"the loving flesh, for which the starved heart cries"—culminating in "the wild darkness ofthe Godhead" and the garden that seizes us with laughter, blowing loose our hearts, like the Mary shaken from her cloud to the enormous gaiety of light and the whole spontaneous flesh now and forever loved in its first being. In sharp imagery and the patient understatement of historical contextualization, the poet's enduring faith is lovingly, gracefully transcribed. Handsomely designed and carefully printed, A Pentecost of Finches presents Siegel's poems withjoy and elegance. Part 3 has seventeen poems on assorted subjects . Some have several sections; one—"A.M." — is three lines long but contains the book's title: "Yellow flames flutter / about the feeder: / a Pentecost of finches." Like the lovely birds in their summer plumage flashing their ardor and their delight, these poems bounce with the sun: Today the sky is butter on my bread. . .. I am. . . in the eye that draws its shape on the sky and lingers, waiting for the face of light. The forty-three earlier poems very modestly selected from his three previous books— The Waters Under the Earth (2005), In a Pig's Eye (1980), and The Beasts & the Elders ( 1973)—present a masterful reading of an actual world, perfect transcriptions by a true naturalist, sometimes formal in mode, sometimes political in attack. The early poems carry an appealing romantic coloration, sometimes expressing simple, immediate, human love— Once inside, all the way home, bags leaning lovesick against us, ice creams thawing in secret, we feed...