The American Century: Literature since 1945 627the breaking aircraft, “Out of their names,” the poet inscribes God on “the living
sky,” as a figure who is both there and not there. Similarly, in “Questions for
Ecclesiastes” (1997), Jarman presents us with an elderly preacher trying as best he
can to provide consolation to the parents of a suicide. “God might have shared what
he knew with people who needed / urgently to hear it,” the poet surmises, but did
not. He “kept a secret,” hiding as usual in silence.
McDowell is interested in the mundane rather than the mysterious. Or, rather,
he is preoccupied with those small, significant moments that can alter a life, in the
presence of miracle in the everyday. In collections like Quiet Money (1987) and
On Foot, in Flames (2002) he explores the intricacies of family life and personal
relationships, deploying craftily constructed plots that build on closely observed
detail. In “The Diviners” (1995), for instance, McDowell dramatizes the difficulties
of a family in California over two generations. One of the characters, an only son,
has to struggle with a family plagued by alcoholism; striving to give some meaning
to his life, his “sense of loss and pain won’t dissipate” we are told; and, in an attempt
to overcome his problems, he finally escapes to Ireland after the death of his father.
More of a resolution is achieved in “The Pact” (1996), in which the central
character does seem to come to terms with the challenges that life throws at him:
in this case, the betrayal of his wife. Faced with deceit, he manages to forgive, and
achieve redemption. McDowell’s narrative poems weave together plots and
subplots that give immediate pleasure and compel the reader to read on. But they
also work at other levels, inviting us to consider what the novelist Oliver Wendell
Holmes described as “that light, impalpable, aerial essence” that hovers around
“the commonplace,” the “vivid poetry” that lurks in even the most apparently
prosaic of lives.
By contrast, Vikram Seth and Rafael Campo (1964–) write from the margins,
although in significantly different ways. Seth is a well-traveled and eclectic poet
who combines an elegant, intricate formalism with an interest in the postcolonial.
His first book of poems, Mappings (1980), contains translations of Hindi, German,
and Chinese poets and reflects both his travels and his sense of himself as a cultural
hybrid. A signature poem, “Diwali” (1979), memorably registers his belief that he
is one of those “Who are not at home at home / And are abroad abroad.” And
traveling, with an accompanying feeling of being in a constant condition of exile,
shapes subsequent collections like The Humble Administrator’s Garden (1985),
a collection of poems arranged around plants and places, as well as his memoir
From Heaven Lake (1983). From cunningly rhymed sonnets set in contemporary
San Francisco to free-verse translations of ancient Chinese poets and the trans-
lations of Mirza Ghalib’s ghazals in A Suitable Boy (1994), Seth is endlessly inventive.
One of his books, for instance, All You Who Sleep Tonight (1990), is a collection of
poems dealing with such somber material as the experiences of a Nazi concentration
camp commandant. Another, Golden Gate (1986), is described as a novel but
is actually an epic poem: a series of nearly seven hundred rhyming tetrameter
sonnets, and a satirical romance about the relationship between two west coast
yuppies. Like so much of Seth’s work, it is elegantly, deftly allusive; and it is asGGray_c05.indd 627ray_c 05 .indd 627 8 8/1/2011 7:31:35 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 35 PM