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Unnecessary Burdens Cooper, Glück, Graham Here are three new books by ambitious and inBuential poets who suffer under burdens. It may be a poet’s responsibility to suffer no more than is absolutely necessary, but deciding how much suffering is necessary is, alas, probably not up to the poet. The burdens evident in these books are common ones, important ones in our culture. If they sometimes seem self-imposed, they may be all the more tragic because of that lack of necessity. If the suffering sometimes seems willful, in the tradition of the Romantic poetic ideal or even the belated Romanticism of Confessionalism , these poets may be all the more generous in offering themselves as examples to us in this post-Romantic age, so we might better understand our own willful suffering. Louise Glück’s Pulitzer-prize winning collection of poems, The Wild Iris, focuses on the burden of religious pain. The book consists of an ongoing dialogue between a god and a human being, a dialogue that is rarely easy. Glück lets the poems’ titles indicate who is speaking, and the essential incompatibility between the two participants in the book’s uncomfortable conversation is suggested, at the start, by the fact that god speaks only as various aspects of nature—“Red Poppy,” “Violets,” “Retreating Wind”—while the speaker addresses god only through the medieval Christian forms of “Matins” and “Vespers.” The speaker’s modes of address, like the notions of a distant, removed , and uncaring god that permeate this book, seem to im69 Review of Scaffolding, by Jane Cooper (Tilbury House, 1993); The Wild Iris, by Louise Glück (Ecco, 1990); and Materialism, by Jorie Graham (Ecco, 1993). Originally appeared in North American Review (September 1994). pede direct or meaningful contact between the speaker and Glück’s essentially pantheistic nature-god. While occasionally given artiAcially forced diction (“that which you call death / I remember”), her nature-god more often speaks with a spontaneous strangeness, as if nature’s heart were talking. Glück’s human speaker, who describes herself in her opening poem as “depressed, yes,” suffers continually in her relationship with this apparently uncaring god, knowing that “it isn’t human nature to love / only what returns love.” Her difAculties with god can seem willful, if not masochistic, as when she tests god by planting a Ag tree in an intemperate climate where it can’t survive: “It was a test: if the tree lived, / it would mean you existed .” She fears that god has “abandoned” her and even imagines that god has envied the closeness she felt with her brother and destroyed the relationship: “who else had reason to create / mistrust between a brother and sister but the one / who proAted, to whom we turned in solitude?” Even her own love for god is a lie: “Forgive me if I say I love you: the powerful / are always lied to since the weak are always / driven by panic.” God, for his part (I use the masculine pronoun consciously, since this god tends to be paternalistic and is occasionally addressed by the speaker as “father”), responds to his deceitful worshipper with contempt and superiority throughout most of the book, addressing her as “you idiot” and remarking, “now I pity you.” The question of why the speaker continues to wrestle with such an unsatisfactory deity arises often to plague this book. Suffering is germane to the tradition of religious poetry, of course; but where a poet like George Herbert, for instance, leavens and justiAes his doubt and anguish with continual doses of celebration, afArmation, and sheer love, Glück’s poems tend to sulk disproportionately. They are a sad mirror of conventional religious faith in our time. By the end of the book, the relationship between the protagonists does begin to change; the human accepts, during one of the most concrete and least lyrical “Vespers” in the book, that “you’re in the garden; you’re where John is,” while god, turned kind parent, sings her a rather condescending song in “Lullaby ”: “Time to rest now; you have had / enough excitement for the time being.” The book resolves its conBicts hastily, though gracefully and with some beautiful writing, as god leaves the 70 human free to do her own creating while she accepts, in her last appearance, that perhaps she is after all free “to Bourish, having no hope of enduring.” The Wild Iris is at its strongest when it allows the mysterious strangeness of...

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