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Lovely hand-signals and a kind of nobility

Martyn Crucefix reviews Dan Chiasson’s Natural History & Other Poems (Bloodaxe £8.95) and Philip Levine’s Stranger to Nothing: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe £9.95)

With just two books published in the US, Dan Chiasson has been hailed as one of the best of his generation, praised by John Ashbery and Robert Pinsky. Bloodaxe have now published a selection of his first book and all of the second in one volume. To say these poems bristle with elegance is the kind of paradoxical judgement you feel Chiasson would appreciate. The bold enjoyment of his own skill is always evident, though some of the work is so highly crafted that it can give the feeling of watching lovely hand-signals. The opening piece, 'Nocturne', will remind some readers of early Michael Donaghy – a well-oiled and highly geared machine – though in this instance the poem folds itself to vanishing point at the last: “this late at night our words / can’t count. Not even these words count”.

Elsewhere, there is some shoring against modernist ruins with fragmentary pieces such as 'The Sensible Present Has Duration' (the title from William James, the notes inform us). What emerges are Chiasson’s fairly traditional interests – the passing of time, the importance but unreliability of memory and the ways in which the self is composed in time. He is a proudly allusive writer – “Those are pearls that were / her pearls” ('Stealing from Your Mother'). Even a poem called 'Boston' – which recalls a “man trying / to steady an / aquarium on his bent knee” who lost his grip and “fish and glass were everywhere” – yields the suspicion that this may well be the Robert Lowell of 'For the Union Dead'. And Chiasson essays the confessional mode pretty frequently in these early poems about childhood, parents, the death of a grandparent.

The sequence 'Cicada' suggests there is something more. It takes its cue from Plato’s Phaedrus – the insect’s voice is really generated by the trapped souls of men “who now / are brittle and wail from treetops”. Discovering a cicada in his room, the narrator is terrified at the responsibility of handling it, but the sequence swiftly departs into apparently unconnected relationships in crisis, a figure contemplating his future child contemplating him. The self-reflexive habit that can over-burnish the surface of some poems to skidding smoothness is resisted here and developed into a more productive paradox: “Sometimes this song feels like a cure / sometimes it makes the hurt much worse”. The cicada men, of course, are really poets, the songs haunting themselves with their own “souls, or childhood fears … parents … those they loved”. Chiasson’s diction reaches easily for rich and lyrical phrases here, but this is a fine discursive poem.

'Natural History' itself leaves Plato and draws on Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis. Now Chiasson dismisses his earlier efforts as trying on the “confessional style for a while” (Randall Jarrell), but some form of truthfulness is at a premium in his desire to become a “transparent eyeball” (Pliny). If this implies an impersonality, then Chiasson achieves it in these poems where the narrative voices remain unstable and elusive. But overall I have to say I was disappointed with the rather miscellaneous nature of the second half of this PBS recommended collection, anticipating that a clear direction would have been established to warrant the high praise.

In a longer poem called 'Scared by the Smallest Shriek of a Pig, and When Wounded, Always Give Ground', the narrator ponders the nature of poetry: “words should perhaps / protect us from real life … a little true, for verification’s sake, / but primarily beautiful”. So much of what Chiasson writes incorporates the ironic glance over the shoulder that one hesitates to identify this as his position, but it strikes me that he is often in pursuit of a consolatory aesthetic – sometimes classical and mythic, on other occasions fragmentary and post-modern. Of course, Pliny’s original project was to be empirical and investigatory, though in the end he told plenty of stories that bore only a remote relation to reality.

On the face of it, the contrast between Dan Chiasson and Philip Levine could hardly be more striking. Bloodaxe have produced a really essential selection from a poet whose relative absence from discussions of US poetry on this side of the Atlantic is a crying shame. Born in 1928 in Detroit, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, the first poems included here were not published until 1963. Like Raymond Carver, to whom he bears some resemblance, Levine spent many years labouring in industry and much of his later poetry recalls these experiences and the people with whom he worked. Where Chiasson is urbane and cosmopolitan, Levine is urban and thrilled by the local. Though encompassing a long writing career, this is not a selection that reveals very much in the way of artistic development. Levine’s characteristic style and tone seem to have come to him fully formed and he has seen little need to alter them. One reason is the importance he clearly places on being true to his materials.

One consequence of this is poetry that casts doubt on the value of the imagination because of its tendency to romanticise real experience. 'Salts and Oils' from the mid-80s moves rapidly through moments in a working, roaming life and then concludes:

                                   These were not
the labours of Hercules, these were not
of meat or moment to anyone but me
or destined for story or to learn from
or to make me fit to take the hand
of a toad or a toad princess

With strikingly different results this is a version of Chiasson’s attempt to achieve a “transparent eyeball”. A major role of the poet is to see things for what they really are and it is in this sense that the title of the collection works. The phrase comes from a late-60s poem in which, visiting a graveyard, the narrator is led to contemplate a series of incidents which draw him to confront the realities of his life, becoming less-deceived, so that “in time one comes / to be a stranger to nothing” ('The Cemetery at Academy, California').

The above quoted passage from 'Salts and Oils' also serves to illustrate Levine’s style – a loosely constructed, colloquial blank verse, driven along vigorously by the syntax across lengthy sentences that work by slow accumulation rather than local explosions of linguistic surprise. This is a fine instrument with which to challenge fantasies of the imagination, but Levine holds firmly to that faculty’s essential role in the re-creation of the past. Often precisely dated, he vividly and lovingly captures scenes and people. A truck-driving uncle from “black Detroit” is sketched through telling detail – his “two hands kneading / each other at the sink” – and this summoning into the kind of art remote from the man’s actual life is, Levine seems to suggest, a kind of redemption. The poem concludes that only now can the Uncle “rise / above Belle Isle and the Straits, / your clear eye / rid of our rooms forever” ('Uncle'). Through the length of this book, similar lives are invoked in this fashion, in finely-judged poems that neither airbrush the poverty and misery inherent in them, nor uncomfortably romanticise the strength and humour these individuals have drawn on to survive.

For some readers there might be something fatalistic about these portraits of working-class America. Ought there not to be more overt political agitation? Robert Duncan once observed to the more militant Denise Levertov that the poet’s role was to imagine rather than oppose. So Levine mines the vein of the individual, the idiosyncratically human, and for him that represents political position enough. In 'Our Reds', he memorialises three characters from the 1940s and their enthusiastic promotion of Communist doctrines. Although the poem bitterly acknowledges that what the future brought in was “an America no one wanted”, its real purpose is to “bless” the three individuals, now vanished with the passing of the years: “bless / their certainties, their fiery voices / we so easily resisted… their faith in us, especially / that faith, that hideous innocence”. And it is not only in moments of reflection, distanced by time, that such working lives are redeemed. This is confirmed in the wonderful poem, An Ordinary Morning, with its plain-seeming account of sleepy workers arriving in the city on a morning bus. The driver and one passenger strike up a bluesy-biblical song – “O heavy hangs the head” – and as the sun rises other passengers are waking, momentarily invested with the kind of nobility that their exterior lives seem relentlessly to deny:

                         the brakes
gasp and take hold, and we are
the living, newly arrived
in Detroit, city of dreams,
each on his own black throne.

Levine has stated that the poetry he read in the 1940s was “utterly lacking” in the kind of people and experiences he had grown up with. His intention has been to add to US literature “what wasn’t there” before. To have done this so consistently – to record the lives of the poor and inarticulate of America without resorting to the angry simplicities of blame or caricature or party politics – is a sign of the highest art. This is a must-buy selection from a body of work that deserves to become far more widely recognised in the UK.