Leaving the Bough: 50 American Poets of the 80s (review)

reviews 197 service in Korea: The scarred battlefield where they had sent him: a shattered bamboo house, a crippled fence, the disrupted furrows: a field fuU of what he thought were corpses. Yet one moved. Then another: a beckoning arm, a moaning head raised, a voice: medic. What he thought was a field of death was instead a field of pain. Those he thought were dead were instead wounded and waiting. NORMAN FINKELSTEIN Leaving the Bough: 50 American Poets of the 80s. Ed. Roger Gaess. New York: International Publishers, 1982. 168 pp. $3.75 (paper), $11.50 (hardbound). If you think podry should be set aside untU the world's more pressing problems are solved, or if your senses have been dulled by yet another detached walk-on-tne-beach with yet another newly canonized pod, or if you find yourself nodding offover the most recent Norton anthology of modern verse, then Leaving the Bough: 50American Poets ofthe 80s may be just the tome you need. And even if none of those conditions applies, you'll stUl enjoy and respect the fine poems collected here and no doubt discover some new young poets whose other works you'll want to read. UnUke most anthologies of verse, this one has a focus, a vital purpose. As editor Roger Gaess says in his Preface, "1 looked for poems of involvement , relevancy, commitment, and immediacy rather than of detachment or selfindulgence . I needed to feel that something was at stake in the poem and in the Ufe that initiated it." No sighing academics, muttering bohemians, or greedy sentimentalists in this volume! Gaess's anthology is—as he tells us—firmly in the tradition of Walter Lowenfels' 1962 collection, Poets of Today, also pubUshed by International PubUshers. Gaess describes Lowenfels' volume as offering a "sodaUy-consdous point of view and [representing] racial and ethnic minorities and progressive writers beyond the tokenism that had characterized previous anthologies." These words can also describe Gaess's selection, for these recent poems —one and all—speak directly to men and women about the varied levels ofreal, lived experience, about the dynamic relations between the personal and the sodai. They dont evade whole realms of experdence. They try, in thdr various modes, to speak truths. They are mediations of a high, but accessible, order. By and large, Mr. Gaess has achived his purpose: these poems do have verve and power, they are skiUfully made, they do speak with immediacy to important human concerns. I hasten to add that the majority of the poems in Leaving the Bough are not explicitly political. Most of them do have in common an impressive critical edge, but there is certainly not some kind of tacit ideological agreement among them. Rather, what they share is a sometimes stunning awareness of, alertness to, the often apparently smooth face of ideology. They concentrate on the beam in our own eye, not the speck in the other's. Gaess obviously wanted to be as inclusive as possible (always given his purpose) and to appeal to as wide an audience as he could, including novice readers. I think this is the right choice, although some may disagree with it. Gaess argues, too, (or wishes) briefly in the Preface that the "politician-planner" should consider and learn from the poet, that the two should inform each other and not "inhabit intellectually exclusive worlds." This is ofcourse an old desire which many consider outdated—but more on that later. The fifty young (under age 45) pods included in Leaving the Bough give us, then, poems that are often not explicitly political but that never lose sight of the political realm. They are not detached; they do not widen or merely lament the tragic modern rift between culture and politics. If I were to pick a single line to sum up or imply the sense of the whole volume, it would be this almost Miltonic one, from James ScuUy's "Esperanza" (the title is the name of the poem's Puerto Rican heroine): Esperanza is sick of forever. 198 the minnesota review For these are variously poems of hope, faith, fortitude, patience, love, righteous anger, exuberance , transforming vision; as such, they...