[In the following excerpt, Jenkins comments on the ubiquitous references to angels in recent American poetry and offers a generally positive review of The Veil.]

Confronted with 130-odd new books of poetry received by MR in 1987, I started out looking for nothing more particular than poems that excited me. Gradually it began to sink in: I was seeing angels, everywhere. In books I liked just as often as in ho-hum ones. Near the end I began to keep count. Of the final eighteen volumes I read, saved for last for no reason but pure chance, fully fourteen contained one or more angels.

Why angels? The trickledown into poetry of the unworldly Reagan years? A reinvasion of beings supplanted in recent decades by extraterrestrials and Cabbage Patch dolls? Or simply the publication of so many new translations of the Duino Elegies? But when I looked at what angels are actually doing in one 1987 volume after another, a hypothesis began to take shape. Here are five fairly representative examples:

[the] printer is so fast
it virtually thinks for you
as though your soul were a
frantic angel imprisoned
in a computer chip. …

(Richard Harteis, Internal Geography, Carnegie-Mellon)

Steers are dumb like angels …

(Ruth Stone, Second-Hand Coat, Godine)

… mosquitoes—
those blood angels …

(Gillian Conoley, Some Gangster Pain, Carnegie-Mellon)

… the uptown prostitutes
          shared the same source
                    and floated down
from 42nd and Times Square like angels …

(Daniel Halpern, Tango, Viking)

This poem is an adagio. A slow
yearning of winds and strings.
Like the hot August night I got
drunk with friends, and laughing
and sweating, we linked arms and lay
back in the deep wine, the cool
Einstinian space of summer grass,
streaming upward like angels. …

(Robert Dana, Starting Out for the Difficult World, Harper & Row)

These are not Rilke's angels, harrowing, imperturbable; these are pliable, domesticated angels, used to being compared to the mundane, subject to the same foibles and failures as physical reality but glad to lend a touch of class to the familiar. What I think we are seeing, in the reappearance of angels, is the reaction of poets to the general suspicion that contemporary poems are small, limited to accidents of personal observation and daily experience. Angels can lift the ordinary to significance, or, conversely, provide a scale against which to measure the ordinary.

Would someone examining the poetic output of a recent previous year have seen as many angels? I don't know for certain. I don't remember noticing so many myself. But the impulse seems to be shared by women and men alike, so far as I can tell, although I didn't count. (Of the roughly 130 books received, just over fifty are by women.) Without particular regard to the presence or absence of angels, but with an overwhelming impression of the predictability of many books, I sorted those received into books that, in my opinion, warranted serious, prolonged attention and those that did not. (Small-press books represented about half of the volumes received, the other half being fairly equally divided between university and trade presses.) The group of books that struck me as being strong books amounted to thirty-five volumes. Of those thirty-five, sixteen were trade publications, twelve were small press books, and only seven were university press sponsored. (The two most active university press series—Pittsburgh's and Wesleyan's—were notable for their absence among even those seven.) As over against the often-lamented failure of trade presses to sustain poetry in this country, the general uniformity and mediocrity of university press books constitute, in my opinion, an even greater embarrassment. It is to the remaining trade presses who maintain poetry lists, together with a wide range of small, independent publishers, that credit for the year's best work in poetry is due.

Of those most interesting thirty-five, I have picked nine books to review in detail. In each instance my choice reflects what I feel to be a greater urgency and unpredictability—a larger taste for, or courage for, risk—than is true of other, perhaps equally accomplished books. Angels turn out to appear in seven of these nine as well. But more often than not, in these seven, angels become the subjects of poems rather than convenient, dross-to-gold similes. …

Next to Lucille Clifton's pressure-treated economy [in Next], the poems in Denis Johnson's The Veil are extravagant cloudbursts, galaxies with barely enough gravity left inside them to hold the pieces together. What does hold them together are sudden fits of non sequitur and hallucination, a world apart from Clifton's focused praise and indignation.

And then we came out of a tunnel into one of those restaurants
where the natural light was so unnatural
as to make heavenly even our fingernails and each radish.
I saw everyone's skull beneath the skin,
I saw sorrow painting its way out of the faces,
someone was telling a lie and I could taste it,
and I heard the criminal tear-fall,
saw the dog
who dances with his shirt rolled up to his nipples,
the spider …

(“The Rockefeller Collection of Primitive Art”)

The desire to heighten (can angels be far behind? no, they can't; several are caught between the covers of this book), pursued in short order by the impulse to pull the rug out from underneath: hyperbole cut by hilarity may be the most reliable earmark of the decade's poetic sensibility. Yet the lines that immediately follow those quoted above show more is at stake in this museum visit than the free play of sentiment and wit:

Why are their mouths small tight circles,
the figures of Africa, New Guinea, New Zealand,
why are their mouths astonished kisses beneath drugged eyes,
why is the eye of the cantaloupe expressionless
but its skin rippling with terror …

I come to believe Johnson's terror is genuine—just as I come to believe Clifton's sympathies are deeply felt—because the language is exact and exuberant (“astonished,” “rippling”) and because Johnson moves from image to image or perception to perception, intuitively for the most part, riding the seat of his pants, rather than by calculation. Sometimes that movement is, to be sure, far less than certain, as in these drifting lines from “Grey Day in Miami”:

Our love has been.
I see the rain.
Nothing
is abstract any more:
I nearly expect one of these
droplets loose tonight on the avenues of the wind
to identify itself as my life.
Now love is not a feeling
like wrath or sadness, but an act
like murdering the stars.

Other times a poem's movement can be very certain, even overly certain, as in the click-into-place assembly of “The Basement.” Most of the time, though, the associative rhythms of these poems fall somewhere between out-of-control and deliberate, switching channels and tracks in a breathtaking display of nimbleness, then landing in surprise on the very spot where they began.

That spot is not always a comfortable one. Johnson goes out of his way to project a bad-boy, iconoclastic self-image, a breezy avatar of disdain. He can swagger and give air time to misogyny, with which—despite his penchant for personae—he clearly sympathizes:

You might as well take a razor
to your pecker as let a woman in your heart.
First they do the wash and then they kill you.
They flash their lights and teach your wallet to puke. …

(“Talking Richard Wilson Blues, By Richard Clay Wilson”)

Or he picks fights with professors or takes sideswipes at homosexuals. Or he can come up with litanies of pity and charity so sudden, so extreme, as to seem disingenuous:

We must start to forgive and not stop
for a single minute, maybe not even to love.
We must look down
out of this age spent telling stories
about each tree, each rock, each
person who is a bird, or a fish, or walks in their fur,
and see our brothers and sisters. …

(“The Other Age”)

Yet just as my patience has stretched thin, the lines that come next—and end the poem—stun and convince:

There is no such thing as danger,
no such thing as a false move,
but they are afraid;
the stores have everything
and everything salutes
its own reflection—shiny, shiny
life that we call
shelf life,
but they are afraid;
the eight-ball is a meatball in whiskey heaven; the motorcycles
stand out front in the sun like spears,
and they are afraid.

Fear is the central fact of these poems. When the fear is addressed as a personal condition, the self-involved poet feels free to make pronouncements about the relation between public and private that are the very opposite of Lucille Clifton's:

I'm trying to explain how these islands of meaningless joy
or the loss of someone close to me, like you,
can make the tragedy of a whole age insignificant. …

(“All-Night Diners”)

The best poems of The Veil, though—and there are a number of alarming, exciting ones—find a point at which cultural satire and self-knowledge join, where inner and outer weather are exchanged. Johnson knows what Clifton knows in the poem that addresses her own “cruelty”—what he disdains in others he carries within himself:

Then how did I finally reach these executives
exiting the plushness carrying cool
musical drinks into the crystal noon
of the Goodyear Tire Company's jumped-up oasis?
The sharks and generals within my heart,
the Naugahyde …

(“The Past”)

Johnson's work in The Veil features various wounded ones—doped-up insomniac monks, cripples, inmates of mental hospitals, Texaco pump attendants—and maintains an air of superiority even as he sympathizes with their woundedness. At those moments when his own vulnerabilities are raw as well, however, the war between moods, between attitudes, can be very powerfully honest and affecting:

In August the steamy saliva of the streets of the sea
habitation we make our summer in,
the horizonless noons of asphalt,
the deadened strollers and the melting beach,
the lunatic carolers toward daybreak—
they all give fire to my new wife's vision:
she sees me to the bone. In August I disgust her.
And her crazy mixed-up child, who eats with his mouth open
talking senselessly about androids, who comes
to me as I gaze out on the harbor wanting
nothing but peace, and says he hates me,
who draws pages full of gnarled organs and tortured
spirits in an afterworld—
but it is not an afterworld, it is this world—
how I fear them for knowing all about me! …

(“Movie within a Movie”)

Although The Veil is not even or steady, either in quality of language or outlook, its poems are daring, frequently disarming, sometimes beautiful, and always on edge. The stanza from “Red Darkness” that follows is typical of Johnson's excitability and ability to excite:

So after I broke the cat's neck with a shovel because it was incurable
          the parking lot looked like it was memorizing me.
I thought I heard the afternoon saying just another son of a bitch,
Just another thrillseeker another
Hard-on another nightmare. The infinite
Accent falling on the self seemed
To hold out forgiveness in its placement of some cars
To my left and to my right a shopping cart or something I forget
          what it was.
The point is, the point is I might have singled out
Anything in that landscape and said those trees are after me; but
It is the nature of the Atlantic white cedar to invade swamps:
It is not the nature of this cedar to judge me. On
The other side of the damages I saw a man
Standing where the scenes of my childhood had been torn down.
And he was carrying the next day in his hands, and he was awake. …