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Dear Acumen,

In his review of Lawrence Sail’s The World Returning, Phil Simmons, commenting on ‘good, solid, concrete images’, ‘precise detail’, ‘emotional reticence’ and nostalgia, evokes a Mr Chips-like figure and does not avoid the obvious danger of basing criticism on too narrow a range of examples. Finding the value of brevity lacking in many of the poems is one thing, (though it is to be found in most of them), but to relate this comment to ‘Cutting the Bay Hedge’, by far the longest poem in the collection, is to take little account of the nature of the longer poem, where afterthoughts and repetition are often not out of place and enrich the process of going to the heart of an experience and working through it: take Robert Frost’s, ‘But I was going to say…’ (l.21 ‘Birches’) and the repeated lines in Douglas Dunn’s ‘The Year’s Afternoon’ and Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘At the Fishhouses’. Might the longer poem at times not need a controlled slackness, the equivalent of a rubato line or two?

   One aspect of the use of imagery not mentioned is its combination of fine observation and sensitivity which allows the reader to recognise connections and relationships in the mystical sense, the peeling away of a first layer of meaning to reveal another. This correlation, which Phil Simmons seems to miss, is present in many of the poems, in, for instance, ‘Grey Heron’, ‘Atlas Cedar’, ‘Winter Solstice.’ There is also the sheer fun of recognising one’s own adolescent posturing in ‘The Addiction’ and of the description of the cable car, ‘ape-easy, hanging on by its one arm’.

   The dismissal of nostalgia as ‘a useless, lying emotion’ leaves little room for the crucial role of memory in the writing of any poem and strikes at the heart of Proust, who would never have managed without the loss of focus mentioned by Phil Simmons.

   The last point - the sketchier the structure, the more interesting are Sail’s poems - must be qualified by the fact that Sail is never sketchy: his attentiveness to scansion would not allow this.


Kathleen Kummer
Dorchester