Mercury Dressing: Poems (review)

At first—only at first, mind you—I had a hard time getting into J. D. McClatchy's new collection. On the jacket flap, the copywriter's drum-beating almost discouraged me from opening the book. McClatchy's work, it claims, "has increasingly revealed a concern with the life of the soul." Suffering cats. In my experience, poets who discourse on the life of the soul usually put us to sleep faster than Sominex. The soul, unfortunately, is harder to visualize than those streaks of the tulip that Dr. Johnson said poets shouldn't number, but which generally make for more arresting and persuasive poetry. As Ezra Pound, wrong about so many things but rarely wrong about poetry, advised poets, "Go in fear of abstractions."

Not that a poet can be blamed for the enthusiasms of his jacket copy. Still, for the title of a poetry book, Mercury Dressing seems rather blah and unengaging. Evidently this god of commerce, Jove's winged messenger, holds great import for the poet; exactly why, he doesn't make clear. The book opens with a title poem in which the god is donning "transparency," also his feathered helmet and a helmet-like codpiece. Somehow this apparition "Unsteadies the routines of the heart." Will the god bring the speaker harm or help? The question remains unanswered. The god disappears "As so much else has down the years" (an apparent stab at Capital-S Significance), though somehow he remains inside the speaker—"His nerve electrifies the air." Are we to expect, then, the poems that follow to be charged with electricity? Only sometimes do we hear the crackle of high voltage. But later, as if to reinforce the book's mercurial theme, there's an extremely fine, vivid translation of a tale from Ovid in which Mercury, on fire with passion for the maiden Herse, has to make his way past her meddling sister Aglauros, whom Envy has turned to stone. McClatchy ends the tale with Mercury charging into Herse's bedchamber, a logical conclusion though not in Ovid. "A god can do this," he adds, "can do whatever he wishes." If McClatchy envies the god that power, I can understand. But what are we supposed to make of Mercury's role in this book? "His message is his being there," the title poem declares. Say what?

When after struggling with that title poem, not getting far, I gritted my teeth and kept reading, I found McClatchy in "Self-Portrait as Amundsen" championing an abstraction:

I have always known that I would be the oneNot just who found but wanted to find the abstractMeaningless point on which the planet turns.

Splendid lines! Coming upon them, I did a double take, feeling like an oaf for having been so hasty to judge. Those lines reminded me that an abstraction can be immense, even in poetry. After all, there's Wordsworth's marvelous sonnet "Mutability" (of "the unimaginable touch of time"), and Richard Crashaw's hymn beginning, "Love, thou art absolute sole lord / Of life and death." If McClatchy wants to seek abstractions as wonderful as the poles of the earth, I thought, then to hell with Pound and more power to him. He includes, by the way, an impressive version of another poem about mutability, one by Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

A deeper perusal of Mercury Dressing proved more and more rewarding. McClatchy is a master at limning particulars—"Outside, a flag of shadow is snapping angrily on the grass." The sea is a mass of "great gray plates / coupling and uncoupling." He can capture precise details in musical words: "Starflakes and splintery stalactites, / A crystalline chaos of sharp shreds." Those wonderfully chewy lines gave me much pleasure. I went around all day chanting them.

In its high intelligence and tremendous formal skill, McClatchy's work is on a level with that of James Merrill, several volumes of whose poems, essays and memoirs, novels and plays he has edited. Evident in McClatchy's poems, too, is his long involvement in...