Poetry for Students

222 Poetry for Students

Santos spans the short, four-letter word “holy”

across the break between lines 34 and 35. This sty-

listic maneuver is the most unusual one in the poem

and is telling about the poet’s method. The over-

simplified explanation for why Santos does not

keep the two syllables of “holy” together is that

keeping the word intact would violate the syllabic

pattern of the poem. The fourth line of each stanza

has ten syllables, and line 34 reaches that total with

“Ho-.” This argument is too easy. The poet has con-

trol of the words he uses, and Santos could have

easily avoided the interruption by using a shorter

word for “industry” earlier in the line.

To divide the word “holy,” dragging it out the

way the poem does, is to diminish the idea that it

represents. In presenting the word in its parts, the

poem requires readers to pay more attention to the

word itself than to its meaning. If the reference was

really to the Holy Spirit of Christian dogma, this

technique might be irreverent or blasphemous. San-

tos, however, is using this phrase in a personal way

when he writes “the Ho- / ly Spirit of / everything

that’s been / taken away.” The central idea of the

poem is ultimate loss, and the words “Holy Spirit”

add a religious dimension. The overall expression

would not work if the poem did not negate the

power of its effect by reminding readers that they

are involved in reading a poem.

Although much poetry is about balance—

between form and idea, thought and substance, im-

plication and assertion—it is even more crucial for

a piece like “Portrait of a Couple at Century’s End”

to stay between the extremes, to not give too much

attention to any of the aspects of the poem at the

expense of others. Santos’s poetry has a melan-

choly edge, a willingness to look at the harshness

just under the surface of everyday life. In this poem,

much is stated about the harshness, and much is

implied about quiet suffering. If this mood domi-

nated by “darker crimes” were not contrasted by

word choice and style, it would seem to present a

vision of unendurable gloom, and that in itself

would not be reality. The situation described in the

poem is complex. The one thing that Santos can-

not say about the situation is that it may change.

That is the point of the poem. With no chance of

even hoping for hope, the poem has to find other

ways to oppose its own misery.

Source:David Kelly, Critical Essay on “Portrait of a Cou-

ple at Century’s End,” in Poetry for Students, Thomson

Gale, 2006.

James Rother

In the following review of The Pilot Star Ele-

giesfrom the online website Contemporary Poetry

Review, Rother calls the collection “astonishing”

and remarks on the “higher reaches of statement”

attained compared with Santos’s previous volumes.

With The Pilot Star Elegies,his fourth collec-

tion of poems and a National Book Award finalist,

Sherod Santos shows convincingly that whatever

suspicions his earlier volumes might have aroused

that here was just one more New Yorker–style poet

specializing in poser-cat’s cradles for the highly

strung, his work—to paraphrase Ezra Pound—is that

of a purveyor of news likely to stay news and not

the preciosities of some warm-up act for the Post-

PoMo Follies. Which is not to say that his earlier

volumes of verse—The City of Women, The South-

ern Reachesand Accidental Weather—lack gravitas

or substance. It is just that the higher reaches of state-

ment attained in this latest book (most formidably

in its centerpiece “Elegy for My Sister,” a poem in

25 parts) are of an elevation barely glimpsed in San-

tos’s prior writings. There is discernment, finely

turned lathework, the business of language on view

with undoctored books—but there is not, at least to

these eyes, the recombinant vitality of lines like

these, from the opening to “Elegy”:

It was late in the day, as I recall,

her pinking winter-white shoulders bent

over the backyard flower beds, soggy still

from the snowmelt that week

loaded underground, at body heat, in April...

Or this concluding stanza, from the all too brief

“Abandoned Railway Station”:

The silence of thousands of last goodbyes.

A dried ink pad. Stanchioned ceiling.

Portrait of a Couple at Century’s End

These reminders of

the genteel world in the

middle of a poem about

misery can be seen as

an exercise in irony, but

the more important

accomplishment is that they

keep the poem from falling

entirely into despair.”