A review of The Blue Estuaries
[Dickey is an American poet and critic whose verse is surprisingly varied in mood, voice, and theme, often fluctuating between humorous and serious observations on life. In the following excerpt, he asserts that Bogan's careful, spare treatment of language enabled the creation of enlightening poetry in The Blue Estuaries.]
The Blue Estuaries reprints the contents of Louise Bogan's Collected Poems of 1953, and adds a dozen poems presumably subsequent to that work. The new poems do not alter Miss Bogan's tone or her concerns: they stress again what the Collected Poems showed us: the spare restraint, the absence of noise and distractions; above all, the desire to present relationships in their most severely essential form. The poem from which the new book's title is taken provides an illustration:
night
The cold remote islands
And the blue estuaries
Where what breathes, breathes
The restless wind of the inlets,
And what drinks, drinks
The incoming tide;
Where shell and weed
Wait upon the salt wash of the sea,
And the clear nights of stars
Swing their lights westward
To set behind the land;
Where the pulse clinging to the rocks
Renews itself forever;
Where, again on cloudless nights,
The water reflects
The firmament's partial setting;
—O remember
In your narrowing dark hours
That more things move
Than blood in the heart.
To be used in this fashion, the country must be observed with a still attention that resists the hasty demand to impose meaning, to label or package or sell. When place has time to assert its own continuity of existence, the difference between surface and essence can be identified, and that identification can then perhaps show us analogous differences in ourselves.
Such observation informs the body of Miss Bogan's work: as a result, the work is sudden, compact, and didactic:
Women have no wilderness in them,
They are provident instead,
Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts
To eat dusty bread.
The didacticism is an earned right, not a mannerism. Where Anne Sexton's poems turn always inward toward the inescapability of the event, toward that hell which is hell because it has no belief in a location other than itself, Miss Bogan's vision is first of the thing, and then outwards; if we are truly responsive, the thing teaches us. The method that teaching takes is a greater understanding and a greater discrimination among the possibilities afforded us by language: as one by one the evasions are recognized and discarded, we may hopefully become more aware of what we can suppose to be permanently true.
I believe Miss Bogan does, often, achieve such permanence. The nature of her decisions and of her exclusions takes her a little way outside clock time, the perennial minutes and their different forms. No more than the convinced hard lyric can she be fashionable or sentimental, choosing the easier moment over the more demanding one. But it is the rigor of that choice that permits finally an upwelling of resonances:
Goodbye, goodbye!
There was so much to love, I could not love it all;
I could not love it enough.
Some things I overlooked, and some I could not find.
Let the crystal clasp them
When you drink your wine, in autumn.
When the place has been understood, the slightest hints assure us of it, so that even in passages in which it is not mentioned, we are persuaded that the figure in its necessary landscape is there.
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