Poetry for Students

228 Poetry for Students

writing, and a second glance at Thomas Mann’s

Death in Venice,James Joyce’s Ulysses,F. Scott

Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby,or Djuna Barnes’s

Nightwoodcompels assent.

On the threshold of the millennium, the lyric

remains an astonishingly versatile and vital form,

as rich in potential and as accessible as it must have

been for Lady Jane Grey. Indeed, one might say

that the lyric offers a particularly appropriate vehi-

cle for expressing both the joys and discontinuities

of modern life. The three poets considered here

have sedulously adapted the lyric to their own

needs. What emerges from their work, however, is

not a pose or a fashionable despair, but rather a

keen awareness, both of the transience of life and

the ways in which transience is embedded in the

lyric form....

In The Pilot Star Elegies,Sherod Santos ex-

plores a wide variety of subjects; inevitably, how-

ever, loss is the overriding theme, a brooding

presence that shadows nearly every poem in the

volume. For Santos, elegy is the purest form of

lyric, an apt medium for capturing the ephemeral-

ity of human existence and confronting grief. In

“Elegy for My Sister,” the poet draws heavily on

memory as he seeks to come to terms with the sui-

cide of his elder sibling: “Each step seems drawn

out endlessly, and echoes / so in memory that I al-

most think I can feel—in her—/ that earth-bound,

raw, quicksilvered weight / a life takes on in that

moment it coarses to be a life.” But if transience is

a dominant motif in The Pilot Star Elegies,Santos

also celebrates resilience: the tenacity of a sea tur-

tle cruelly tethered and left to die, the exile of the

current Dalai Lama “blessed with the common

sense / to survive himself,” and the abiding love of

a married couple whose shared memory of a quar-

rel years before awakens “buried longings.” In

poetry as rhythmically precise as [David] Baker’s

and as mythically charged as [Sydney] Wade’s,

Santos forges an aesthetic commensurate with what

J. D. McClatchy has called “the world’s grief, the

soul’s despair.”...

IV

In his fourth book-length collection, The Pilot

Star Elegies,Sherod Santos encompasses the myr-

iad contingencies of loss in lyrics as richly allusive

as Wade’s and as musically adept as Baker’s. In

the centerpiece of his volume, “Elegy for My Sis-

ter,” Santos shuns the traditional approach of trans-

lating bereavement into consolation, preferring

instead to delve into the psychological and confes-

sional dimensions of grief. In the prologue to this

long poem (to which I shall return for fuller dis-

cussion), Santos relies on memory to illuminate the

tragedy of a sibling who eventually took her own

life: “Her vine- / borne flowering marginalia (flow-

ering now // in the ever-widening margins of mem-

ory).” But the book contains other meditations

equally striking in rhythm, syntax, diction, image,

and metaphor, on subjects from a dying hawksbill

turtle to the exiled Dalai Lama. Transience is the

touchstone of Santos’s aesthetic, as these lines from

“Abandoned Railway Station” reveal: “Large

empty walls, and a water stain, / ultramarine, like

a fresco of Perseus, / head in hand, fleeing the

golden falchion.”

Occasionally Santos’s lyrics depict transience

within the context of apparently cruel and gratu-

itous behavior. Here are the first eleven lines of

“Sea Turtle”:

Out of a ripple in the sea grass,

two unhoused fiddler crabs

sidestep past the almost-dead

hawksbill turtle turned over

on the beach and left there

staked with a length of broom-

stick and baling wire. The squared,

inquiring head upstraining,

the plastron split, and the sun-

dazed eyes that will not weep

for such incongruities as these.

Aptly tethered to the left-hand margin by

trochaic inversion throughout stanzas one and two,

these truncated lines nevertheless betray a rhythmic

lilt in the repetition of “ripple” and “fiddler,” evok-

ing the frenzied grace of the danse macabre in the

consonative phrase “sidestep past.” The hierarchy of

images allows a spatial structuring that juxtaposes the

“unhoused fiddler crabs” with the “turtle turned

over,” thus asserting the incongruity of a seagoing

carnivore become ballast to its own massive heart.

Other than the poet’s metrical dexterity, the only hu-

man presence is the malevolent contrivance of stake

and “baling wire.” The sun beats down, and the horny

plates of the hawksbill’s underbelly fracture along

the grain, the fissure accentuated by the plosives and

sibilants of “plastron split.” Despite its torpor and

helplessness, the aquatic reptile’s eye is moistened

by no rheum: “Faced into the current of an on- //

shore breeze, the once-buoyant / cradle of its shell

closes like / a trench around its breathing.” Notwith-

standing the metaphor “cradle of its shell,” Santos re-

sists the impulse toward pathetic fallacy and elegiac

apotheosis. Transience, especially mortality, is in the

order of things; moreover, the sea appears hardly less

capricious than the malign intelligence that stranded

the turtle at the margins of its natural habitat:

Portrait of a Couple at Century’s End