Modern surrealism, starting with Guillaume Apollinaire, who coined the word back in 1917, usually promises more than it delivers. If the promise, to quote André Breton's surrealist manifesto, is art and poetry full of "previously neglected forms of association," brimming with magic, leaps beyond reason, and hallucinations, the delivery, more often than not, is either trite or incomprehensible. "Automatic writing," another "method" favored by some surrealists, frequently combines perfectly trivial insights with failed grammar. These lapses are more apparent in surrealist poetry than in the painting, where the technical mastery of the artist—Max Ernst, say, or Duchamp or Dali or Klee—plus sheer intelligence and wit, may manage to steer what could be merely puzzling away from the totally private, the brutally introverted, the adolescent. In surrealism, the danger always matches the invitation. On the one hand, a dull talent may produce art or poetry that is pure show-biz dazzle, and about as powerful in the end as the timid Wizard of Oz, a charming knave full of bemused self-pity. On the other, there are Bosch and Rimbaud to be considered, geniuses anticipating surrealism, who invented realms of color, energy, and cleverness in which the subconscious plays with its torments and finds freedoms undreamed of in Horatio's philosophy, in which the miraculous "more" of things; their special mystery, appears in marvelous new ways.

Plainly too, as in any art that focuses exclusively on the "self," an imagined self really, the attitudes of the surrealist artist, his attitudes toward himself, determine the range and value of the art. This is not the case with other sorts of artists, who may use the startling, bizarre paradoxes of surrealism as possibilities, while remaining committed to reason. Shakespeare's attitudes toward himself play no role in his writings. Dante's despair, at the beginning of the Inferno, is cushioned by faith in God and faith in poetry. Whitman's celebration of himself is really a celebration of everyone else. Emily Dickinson allows her absolute trust in the discipline of the quatrain form, in which she nearly always writes, to transmute her private griefs into the gold of a public vision, and her hopefulness into an idea of the sublime, reaching far beyond herself. Dylan Thomas, at his surrealistic best, loses himself entirely in his devotion to the magic of words and the English language.

The poet Diane Wakoski has always ranked herself among the latest surrealists, taking the risks and sometimes succeeding. Her frequent goal is to create "extravagant surrealist imagery, like the girl riding naked on a zebra, wearing only diamonds." This was the promise, at any rate, in her preface to Trilogy (1974), a collection of her first three volumes of poems. The dream was perhaps that of a modern Lady Godiva, riding naked through suburbia and challenging Henry Miller's air-conditioned nightmare-America, perhaps on a bicycle or in a used car. But the intention was not to force her husband to lower the tax rates (that was Lady Godiva's purpose, in Coventry, in the feudal eleventh century). Instead it was to shock the sophistry put of the souls of so-called reasonable people.

Refreshingly enough, this was the effect produced by The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems (1971), with its striking dedication: "This book is dedicated to all those men who betrayed me at one time or another, in hopes that they will fall off their motorcycles and break their necks." The selfpity and likely self-delusion of this statement are arrestingly mocked by its irony, and by the steely clarity of the voice, a voice that often whispers its thunder. Through thirteen volumes of poems, with the first, Coins and Coffins, dating back to 1962, Wakoski has been honing her steel and polishing it. In The Rings of Saturn, her most recent volume, she offers a steel sometimes so polished as to become a mirror of surrealistic self-dramatization, as in "Light":

Books and light combine deliciously and surrealistically in these keen few lines, melting into algae, the "nutrient waters" of ponds and thought, buds, stems, shining, acts of creation, all swimming, traveling upward into the holiness of the "morning's breviary," the book itself. There is control here, a smart tension, and a release from self. The associations—of books with the making of life in light and primal clean waters—are public, poised, and original.

This ideal is not everywhere met, and The Rings of Saturn, through fifty-seven lyrics, offers the sort of unevenness to be expected of poems committed to a single tricky aesthetics, surrealism, rather than to several aesthetics at once, and to the balance they could provide together. Often a justifiable rage seems to organize these poems, substituting for insight, faith, and form, and weakening the lines. Often the plucky impertinence of Wakoski's voice, always a pleasure in itself, sinks into a peevishness of tone that might belong in a letter to a friend but lacks the resonance of poetry, as in "The Lady Who Drove Me to the Airport": "How I hate the human voice / after being trapped on the Long Island Expressway / for nearly three hours with that woman's steady / chatter." Lines such as these do not simply fail. They abandon all effort at transforming experience into alive art. Surrealism droops into inconsequence.

This is to say that Wakoski's most recent collection is at its strongest when her gifts as a surrealist shine through. In "The Handicapped at Risen Hotel," a boy who turns into a clock, a man whose hands "mistake themselves for pliers," and a girl whose ankles are "limbs of white birch / unbending" evoke "our interiors / with silence and some horror." "Saturn's Rings," the sequence of eleven poems at the end, from which the volume takes its title, is an often captivating, often self-pitying cry from the depths, or from "a hotel balcony" on Saturn, "Where at last / whatever I create / may finally be / brilliantly, inexorably / my own." The cry is especially moving when uttered in the bright, chromic voice of Wakoski's most surrealistic lines. She is fine at depicting the possibility that "the world / is flying out of control," and that we may be living in "a disintegrating time." At these moments, her sense of humor, and even a demonic sort of satire, turn horror into solid shapes.

Surrealism surely tends to satire, perhaps because of its abruptness, its ambushes of amazement. It will tolerate compassion, nourish wit, adore high skill, and even accept a metallic scorn. All of these appear in abundance in the poetry of, say, Pablo Neruda, the century's finest surrealist poet so far, and in the surrealist films of Bunuel. What surrealism cannot abide, by definition, is mere bathos. It is an alchemist's aesthetics, forever seeking the alteration of the ordinary. When at their best Wakoski's poems show this understanding, they become pure nectar.