564 The American Century: Literature since 1945So, in “Some Musicians Play Chamber Music,” Bronk claims, in a phrase echoing
Stevens, that “all we will know are fragments of the world,” even in art. And, in
“The Mind’s Landscape in Winter,” there is a further echo when Bronk speaks, with
a strangely bleak beauty, about the “winter mind” that “is always lost and gropes its
way ... even when the senses seize the world.” For Bronk, as for Stevens, perhaps the
only refuge against the unhomelike nature of our world is supplied by the stories
and metaphors we come to inhabit. And in his poetry, as in Stevens’s, the elusive
character of reality, the sense of a meaning always deferred, is registered with a
pellucid fluency of diction, a purity of rhythm as subtle agreements of sound are set
out in a basic iambic line. What is seen by Bronk is slippery, evasive. How it is spoken
of is transparently clear and secure. “Let our metaphors be accurate,” Bronk
concludes “The Wanted Exactitude,” since, as he perceives it, metaphor is as close to
reality as we can get. This is a poetry that assaults all our assumptions to knowledge
but does so with a knowing precision. “What else but the mind / senses the final
uselessness of the mind,” Bronk asks in “The Mind’s Limitations Are Its Freedom.”
And he continually meditates on the irony, the paradox framed by that question,
while finding anchorage in the one place where, for him, it can be found: in accurate
metaphor, appropriate speech.
Ambiguous but subtly different kinds of distancing and devotion to accuracy of
idiom are to be found in the work of Amy Clampitt (1920–1994) and Louise Glück
(1943–). Clampitt has a habit of weaving the phenomenal world into an artful
piece of embroidery. In “The Kingfisher,” for example, the title poem of her 1983
collection, the calculated play of imagery, a strict and quite complex stanzaic form,
winding syntactical shapes, and a feeling for words as distinctly odd artifacts all help
transmute the story of a love affair into a tapestry, rich and strange – or, as Clampitt
herself puts it, into “an illuminated manuscript in which all the handiwork happens
to be verbal.” With Glück, the effect is not so much of a mosaic as of ritual. Glück’s
poems (in collections like The First Four Books of Poems (1995) and Aver no (2006))
deal with themes that are intensely personal in origin: family life (“Poem,” “Still
Life”), motherhood and children (“All Hallows,” “The Drowned Children”), a lost
sister (“Descending Figure”), love between a man and a woman (“Happiness”).
But everything is rendered in an oblique, impersonal manner, seen as if through the
wrong end of a telescope. The actors in these human dramas are usually anony-
mous; there is a timeless quality to their actions; and the terms in which they are
rescued for our attention possess the stark inevitability of fable. This is the realm of
divination, or myth: an oracular voice tells us of events that are dreamily repetitive,
foreknown yet mysterious because they are attached at all times to certain rites of
passage, the primal and traumatic experiences of birth, growing up, and death.
Along with these new departures in formalism, however, poetry of the personal
has continued unabated. In several instances recent writers have developed the
tradition of relating identity to landscape. John Haines (1924–2011), for instance,
connects the wintry surroundings of Alaska and the Middle West “with its trodden
snow / and black Siberian trees” to harsh visions of himself and his culture; in such
collections as Winter News (1966), News from the Glacier (1982), and For the Century’sGGray_c05.indd 564ray_c 05 .indd 564 8 8/1/2011 7:31:31 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 31 PM