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

186 LETTERS IN CANADA 1989 Cook tackles most ofStevens's poetry, often in close detail. She finds new things to say about familiar topics, such as Stevens's interior paramour, poems of place and climate, 'fluency' poems, and the conditions of belief as subject to metamorphosis. She sounds his peculiar diction (aspic, fan, turn, soil, uncrumple, normal, transport) for its resonance. She always strives to 'hear' poetry: the auditory sense dominates as she listens for music, echoes, and allusions. When studying a poem she discourages a pedestrian, 'mimetic' reading; quicklysurmountsa flat-footed, allegorical reading; and then soars into the stratosphere of criticism, where she examines topoi and intertextual allusions. Higher still are metalepsis and images of topoi. Criticism for Cook is a noble rider that soars through the lofty reaches of 'againstness,' where texts displace each other and dislocate themselves. Following the lead of Bloom and John Hollander, she traces the arguments ofthe poems as they swerve from trope to trope and echo to echo. There are dangers in this approach, as Cook acknowledges. If we take 'word-play' too broadly, the figure grows so diffuse that it refers to writing in general: everythingbecomes word-play. Similarly, her earis so acute that she can hear almost anything. In one section she hears Stevens echoing Milton through Wordsworth. She hears du Bellay, James, Hawthorne, Proust, Browning, Aristotle, Gcero, Quintilian, Curtius, and LarzerZiff, all within a page and a half. True, these echoes do not all haunt the poem in question ('Domination of Black'), but the list shows how commentary can overwhelm the text that it glosses. The list also betrays a tendency to show off; occasionally Cook cannot resist congratulating herself for discovering things unrecognized yet in prose or rhyme. Some echoes seem far-fetched, although I suppose fetching-from-afar might serve as a long-range mode of Stevensian 'transport.' Given these dangers, it comes as a relief when Cook announces that she positively does not hear Yeats in 'invective against Swans.' More important, she admits that while word-play has no limit, in practice it must be limited by both poet and critic. Closure is one subject that she might have expanded: how do we know when to stop? what makes Stevens call a halt? what principles beyond individual deafness limit discourse? I just said that Cook could hear echoes of almost anything, but the charge is not accurate. She loyally follows Bloom by referring to 'strong' predecessors: Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Emerson, Yeats. There is firm sense of a canon here, and a familiar one at that. (JON I

pdf

Share