POETRY IN REVIEW

1 4 6 Y P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W G E O R G E B R A D L E Y Books of verse are the ultimate niche market: each its own. We are told that more books of poetry are being published at present than ever before, but how many of them are read by more than the author’s intimates? One issue is the di√use and incurious nature of today’s audience. Lovers of poetry seem content with tunnel vision . Poetry has become a fragmented enterprise, divided into smaller and smaller constituencies, and achieving any sort of perspective on the merits of poets outside one’s immediate circle is rarely a priority. Given the essentially provincial mentality that attends the art form’s reception, it might seem a tall order to ask American readers to focus their attention on a poet born and raised in England. All the same, it’s worth a try. Some poets do leap the Atlantic, and when they do such border-crossers often deserve our study. Their way with language can tell us something about our own, and their alien perspective can illuminate our native concerns. One poet who has made the transition is James Lasdun, B l u e s t o n e : N e w a n d S e l e c t e d P o e m s , by James Lasdun (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 176 pp., $16 paper) T h e S w i m m e r : P o e m s , by John Koethe (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 96 pp., $23) 1 4 7 R whose volume containing new and selected poems has recently been issued by a major publishing house in New York and thus invites notice. Perhaps the simplest way to acquire a literary presence on both sides of the Atlantic is to spend a significant part of one’s life in both places, which is what Lasdun has done. He was born in London, and the first steps in his literary career were taken there, as a reader will hear immediately upon beginning this book. The poet has lived in the States for many years now – indeed, as with T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, whether he is to be classified as English or American is open to debate – but the earliest poems in the present volume were written and first published in England. They are the author’s compositions most foreign to an American ear, and the selection made among them serves to emphasize the fact that he started on his way situated at the opposite end of the rhetorical scale from, say, William Carlos Williams. The youthful poems Lasdun has chosen to reprint are highly wrought, with a diction dense enough to require multiple readings, and their formal arrangements might be described as protective measures. Earth in her own shadow like a cat in heat lures down the gods; you catch a musk, the brandied scent of Sekhmet on the frost, a whi√ of naphtha in the lamp-bronzed dusk, iced gutters crackling underfoot. This wintery stanza introduces a poem called ‘‘Vanishing Points,’’ which will be concerned with the lightning flash of artistic inspiration and the ghostly presence of such stimulus inherent in any true object of art. That is, it’s a poem about poetry and the rapidly arriving yet alarmingly evanescent ideas that go into it, themes much in evidence in what was an already highly accomplished first book appropriately titled A Jump Start. The ostentatiously resistant façade of ‘‘Vanishing Points’’ (Sekhmet is an ancient Egyptian goddess who threatened to destroy the human race) and adroitly handled nods to the history of English poetry (‘‘lamp-bronzed dusk’’ calls to mind the kennings of Anglo-Saxon verse) may be found also in the handful of other poems Lasdun has distilled from that volume. The young poet did make verse that is more straightforward – one such poem not in the new book 1 4 8 B R A D L E Y Y is an extended narrative written in seductive couplets comparing an irretrievably...