Night Visions by John Foy, and: So Where Are We? by Lawrence Joseph (review)

In John Foy's somber new collection (and winner of the New Criterion Poetry Prize) Night Vision, one of the most memorable poems is "Killing Things." Operating at multiple layers, this poem lays out a program of sorts. Foy places himself last ("When my turn came") in a line of poets who have unwittingly killed small creatures and written poems about it. Methodically articulated, one stanza per poet, "Killing Things" is sober and matter-of-fact but also wry; there's room for glancing commentary on the how as well as the what of the poets' accounts of their unwitting blood-lettings. Of Wilbur's poem about his clipping off the leg of a toad with a power mower, Foy writes "He used/the words 'ebullient' and 'emperies' / to talk about the life he'd compromised. / What would Philip Larkin think of these?" Death is death, but styles vary. To write about a killing is, for a poet, inevitably also to choose a kind of language. Wielding a power mower and writing a poem are both exercises of power, but different kinds of power. Poets have more control over the words they use ("a poet," said James Merrill to an interviewer, "is a man choosing the words he lives by") than over the depredations wrought by their tractors or lawn mowers. But ultimately, as this book reminds us, we'll all get mown down.

Many of the poems gathered in Night Vision ache with a subdued but all-encompassing sense of powerlessness. In "Killing Things," as throughout the collection, the voice is most compelling when it hews to a sober simplicity. The poem ends with Foy's victim, a rabbit:

I'd laid its back right open to the bone,but it was still alive and looked at me,and then I had to kill it with a stone.

These lines illustrate Foy's unassuming but almost unerring gift for writing both idiomatically and iambically. One can hear them being said, and hear the tone of voice. It's a shame that supererogatory adverbs sometimes clutter Foy's lines, lines which then, though they still sound as if they're being spoken by someone we know, would be more lapidary and elegant without the phatic "actually" in "Killing Things" or the two uses of the word "just" (as an adverb) in the otherwise powerful title poem. The brooding quality of Foy's vision is best expressed when his language is cleanest and simplest.

Night Vision (a fine title—but why do I keep wanting to call the book Dark Vision?) has its moments of brightness, but by and large this book resists any easy redemption, any final ray of light. Not that the poet is unaware of the temptation of facile sweetness—far from it. "How badly I would like to say / some dulcet thing / about that most unknown / of birds, the hunched one hoarding / the only word it knows …" he writes in "Night Heron," and it's not hard to imagine the bird as a kindred spirit, another singer in the gloaming, even if it knows only one word.

And that one word will have to suffice. "Night Heron" ends:

Taken by its task,absorbed in telling beadsor praying quietly that fishmay always come,the poor contrarian holds out a hopethat it's enoughto go on doing what we can.

Some of the more subtle poems here, lit by a momentary tranquility yet also often clouded by an unsettling hint of desolation, celebrate the silence and solitude nature can offer. "Sunlight on the Snow Today" recalls two poems of Wallace Stevens, another poet who spent his days in an office. The bright white landscape where "the wind … says only tactical things" echoes "The Snow Man," and if I'm not imagining things, the voices of children "from even farther out," at the poem's close, conjure up however faintly the...