Brief Solace of Form

With wit and devotion to the two great subjects love and war, Paul Oppenheimer's new book of poems, In Times of Danger, vigorously depicts the life and concerns of a man over the past decade and does so by finding a home for his experience in the sonnet.

What kind of man? The poems reveal a New Yorker, given to ruminating about space, the sea, bats, Plato. A lover, aging, astonished by and reveling in a shared life. A scholar. Someone who bikes in Central Park and interviews job applicants; who loves books and poets and hates false friends and hypocrisy; who broods about terror as well as love, reason as well as passion. He can't get death off his mind. He doubts himself. He has nightmares. History and democracy preoccupy him. He lives in a city altered by the attacks of 9/11 and often retreats to a countryside rich in its own conundrums, always to return to that haunting, haunted "living city." Frankly antiwar, he criticizes the operations of government and bureaucracy. His increasing dismay with politics reaches from ancient times to our entry into the Iraq War ("So now at last we hear that great red force..."). At the same time, he marvels at the powers of love and art to give human beings breathtaking, and sustaining, encounters with truth.

But why choose the sonnet? In The Birth of the Modern Mind: Self, Consciousness, and the Invention of the Sonnet (1989), Oppenheimer declares the sonnet was meant "as an instrument of self-reflection." Its preoccupation with the interior life makes it natural place to meditate—on many subjects. Like William Wordsworth, Oppenheimer finds "brief solace" in the form. The destabilizing power of love—its capacity to evoke terror, awe, and joy—has always been the meat and drink of the sonnet. As to the unspeakable upheaval brought by war, perhaps fourteen lines offer a small compass within which one can try to exert control.

Oppenheimer argues against those who "say that sonnets cannot hold great battles / and that this closet cannot contain" the horrors of war with "hand-me-downs // such as these old-fashioned close-knit lines." He makes the best case in a poem called "A Matter of Form." He needs "a form that I did not invent...." Eight hundred years of sonnets suggest this form can carry what needs to be said. He fears "what may soon be done / with fixing peace to make it more like war / and fixing war to make it surgical." Against this fear, the sonnet provides a tool—or maybe weapon—no, an instrument, with its implication of singing:

like some good argumentthis form is worn with rubbing bright as steel,

and tuned by ancient anguish to impartthe strain of modern doubt: an instrumentjust right, just now, on which to test my heart.

Repeatedly, he explores what draws the modern world into war. Rage and fear are powerful engines, along with "cocksureness." In "Desert Preparations," he finds himself admiring the beauty of the "hit-and-run ways" of bombing, watchable on TV—these new, "ideal...forms of death." In what way ideal? He tucks the answer into parenthesis: "(which is to say, as quiet as the rustle / of dresses on this year's chic New York runways—/ that costly, that well tailored)." Deftly, he skewers the money behind war, and sees through to the terror it brings cloaked as finesse. He observes that the apparatus of the state and our political hubris are growing steadily: "I now live in one vast electric ear," he says in the title poem, "In Times of Danger."

[T]he state inspects my wishes.......................................all this, they say, to check the lethal zestof those who will not listen to the West.

In "Pressures," he deplores the rigid mentality present in the right and the left, as well as the fanatic: "I see a chasm widen as a maw / prepared for those who cannot recognize / how give-and-take must form the firmest law." "Those...