who never belonged to us, someone
it is useless to think about or remember.
The task of this elegy is to accept the abso-
lute loss and suffering that the living experience.
The dead brother is not lost merely to himself, or
to some limited point in time, nor is imagination
seen as an adequate substitute for real loss,
because poetry is only an ‘‘almost capable.’’
From within the poem, there is clear acknowl-
edgement that all moves at assuming the con-
sciousness of others can only be partially or
totally blocked: and then the poem enacts that
blockage. When memory picks up an isolated
picture of the dead brother, and tries to animate
that body with what would be its living voice—
projecting the long dead into the present
moment—the real nature of loss is sustained.
The speaker of section 4, playing at supposing
his brother alive, and training his eyes on that
resurrected image, says:
I think he’s going to ask
for beer for breakfast, sooner
or later he’ll start making obnoxious
remarks about race or sex
and criticize our loose ways
of raising children, while his eyes
grow more slick, his puritan heart more pure
Then dismisses that imagining: ‘‘But no,
that’s fear’s reading.’’ And returns his brother to
the mute and unknowable dead. What is dead is
dead, not only to itself, but more crucially, and
more persuasively this time,to us.We long for the
company of those who are dead, but fruitlessly:
... —if it’s true
of love, only what
the flesh can bear surrenders to time.
Both the earlier and later elegy offer a rich-
ness of life gathered in for observation, and a
steady clearsightedness. But the second elegy,
unlike the first, highlights much more complex
personal and familial relationships over a longer
arc of time. The earlier elegy, freshly within the
experience, shaped its retrospective pastoral icon
from childhood material, and interwove an
account of its grief with farm imagery and ani-
mal life. Both are lovely poems; but the one less
fierce, and written in middle age, draws closer to
people, farther from nature, while it continues
the earlier poem’s stoic resignation to the rule of
severance over our lives and language.
But in the elegies for the poet’s mother, the
subject tests other relations and perceptions,
with strained results. These elegies and the
poems that deal with children and friends prefer
conventional bromides, or conventional eva-
sions and discretions. Nearing the conclusion
of ‘‘The Last Hiding Places of Snow,’’ a patchy,
if intermittently interesting poem, Kinnell shifts
from his earlier view of the flesh as perishable,
declaring the mother ‘‘beloved dross promising
heaven,’’ and describes her ultimate transmuta-
tion from dead woman to eternal presence:
Every so often, when I look
at the dark sky, I know she remains
among the old endless blue lightedness
of stars; or finding myself out in a field
in November, when a strange
starry perhaps the first snowfall blows
down across the darkening air, lightly,
I know she is there, where snow
falls flakes down fragile softly
falling until I can’t see the world
any longer, only its stilled shapes.
This soft falling skitters uncomfortably
close to bathos, and matches other sections in
‘‘Fisherman’’ and ‘‘Two Set Out on Their Jour-
ney’’ where there are similar forced marches
heavenward. More convinced by his religious
skepticism than by his half-hearted religious
faith, I would rather wait for the Kinnell who
ends the poem on the human side of the grave as
‘‘the memory / her old body slowly executes into
the earth.’’ With the marvelous turn on execute,
the poem conforms to its darker finalities, and
briefly, the language is once again invested.
But invested in a way that underlines the
whole problem of the new book. While faith in
the existence of a language, of existence itself as
code is named, nevertheless the constraints that
Kinnell has voiced earlier in prose eventually
close in on poetry, and shut down faith in lan-
guage just as he gives himself no other ground to
stand on as his junction between flesh and all
forms of spirit. The hop from ‘‘lowly touchers of
physical reality’’ to ‘‘images’’ is all we have left as
passage over the gap between ideas and things.
The only way that the nominalist doctrine that all
American poets have inherited—‘‘No ideas but in
things’’—can be subverted is to take it seriously
enough; to submit to its inherent realism and to
believe that being and saying are one and the
same. To see that blackberries are an order of
language; and that word is a form of blackberry.
When Kinnell refuses to walk on that water,
to rest on the constitutive powers of language,Blackberry Eating