[In the following essay, which initially appeared in 1978, Eddy offers an overview of Stryk's poetic career, contending that "in the whole of his writing, we can sense a series of great, daring changes which have formed a poet of rare stature and integrity."]

"Just as at fifty a man has the face he has earned, the lineaments of his poems reveal the range and depth of his spiritual life. Simply by surviving I have become a middle-aged poet."

—Lucien Stryk

When you take a walk with contemporary American poetry, you can expect to take some great risks, find real people to love and even get a few laughs; but the trick is that you have to listen with your whole life, not just the part of you that reads the books. Poets have been asking their readers to suspend disbelief and venture a few leaps of the imagination for a long time and they, and we, have been paying with consciousness. Our time awake in the world is enhanced by such poets who reward our leaps with new ways of seeing or, simply, with voices in the wilderness that give off the necessary assurances.

Lucien Stryk is a man who wagers his life in this pursuit of communicating the ineffable. His struggling early verse bitterly and needlessly rhymed itself into complacency but gave way to a poetry that solidly accommodates the range of his experience, the range of his art. He abandoned the more academic views of art to favor the Zen aesthetic: "the distance between man who thinks and man who thinks he thinks: wait" ("Zen: The Rocks of Sesshu," The Pit and Other Poems). This is the kind of response one will inevitably make to an art that is also a way of life.

Rilke says at the end of his poem "Archaic Torso of Apollo," "you must change your life." A statement of poetics like this points out in all directions to all of us who find our peak experiences in the arts, through an emotional appreciation of the world we see or by simply knowing a great poem. And once we know that poem, we are changed. We realize a flux of new ideas, new potentials, opening up before us. We also assume a new responsibility, as Stryk says in his interview, "By great works, the artist is warned: he cannot afford to use his art for unworthy purposes" (Chicago Review, No. 88, 1973). The poet, at this point, is free to do positive things through his art but is also bound to an intrinsic aesthetic, even a morality, in his work.

The world-view, the morality, of a poem is always expressed in the assumptions the poem makes. The statements and actions a poem makes are made possible by the world the poet creates in the first line, even in the title. In "Christ of Pershing Square," we are given a confrontation that has psychologic and religious resonance, and we know it right off the bat.

     "Christ of Pershing Square"

"I can prove it!" the madman cried
And clutched my wrist. "Feel where the nails
Went in! By God, I bear them still!"

Half amused, I shrugged and let him
Press the hand against the suture:
"All right," I said, "they cut you up."

Suddenly those fingers grasped
A hammer, it was I had hoisted
The cross his flung arms formed there.
"Yet," I whispered, "there remains
The final proof—forgiveness."
He spat into my face and fled.

This happened in Los Angeles
Six months ago. I see him still,
White blood streaming, risen from
Cancerous sheets to walk a Kingdom.

We are given the world of a strange encounter. Acts of desperation are suggested by "madman" and "clutched." Yet, the speaker of the poem acts with passivity in a situation that calls for total rejection. We now know a great deal about the speaker: "Press the hand against the suture: All right." The tone is searching and willing to remain aware. The speaker is finding religion, in this situation, that understands human suffering; he admits his own guilt and realizes the need for forgiveness. The result, however, is a rejection and denial from the Christ figure that allows room for the image-mind to see the "white blood streaming," resurrection, and the "Kingdom" in a new way. Encounters, human experiences, do determine art and the world that is recreated in the reader.

It is difficult and dangerous to make art that is willing to incorporate the whole of human experience. Many great people have made huge sacrifices (Neruda, Wright, Miguel Hernandez) and suffered, often, great setbacks to make art that tries to contain and express a singular life. Great artists abandon a great deal in order to stake life on an attempt at the truth. The trials are much more intense, perhaps, than the rewards, but the driving desire is the most important, most common, element shared by the makers of good poems.

Lucien Stryk published his first book when he was twenty-nine and living in England, working at the University of London. Taproot (1953) is full of elaborate metaphoric conceits and "difficult" rhymes. However, despite its "first book" flaws, it shows a definite direction and solid promise in the first two stanzas of "Masks" (which, incidentally, are all that remain in the version released in Selected Poems):

Stryk's second book. The Trespasser, was released three years later but proves to be disappointing. These poems are now more stilted than even the earliest poems. Perhaps Shelley's "internal and external impression" are driven to sell over these poems, but the quite stale influence of the British Romantics remains in lines like these.

Shelley's influence might make us believe that the poet is a medium through which the poem passes. Therefore, "the Muse" holds the chief responsibility for art, not the human poet. This is a precarious attitude for a young poet to assume. Often the poems that come from "the Muse" are imitative and negligent in message or craft. The source of the poem is removed from its maker. This is the dichotomy between poet and product that stands in the way of these first two books.

In Notes for a Guidebook (1965), Stryk begins to follow an aesthetic that is open to his own particular voice and experience. He makes a better, looser kind of poem. At this time, he was working in Japan, Persia and the U.S. on the first of his Zen Buddhism anthologies, Zen: Poems, Prayers, Sermons, Anecdotes, Interviews, for Doubleday/Anchor. The variety of experiences of this period in his life began to enter his poetry.

Stylistically, it was transformed. He abandons the forced poetics of his first two collections and adopts the three-line stanza he uses to this day. He states, "though unintended the stanzaic unit I came up with was in length and feeling very close to the haiku, and at its best as compact as the short Zen poems I was translating. Perhaps the fact that the '(image) unit' was made up consistently of just so many lines, so controlled, was a matter of chance, the result simply of the way eye and ear, projecting my needs, meshed" ("Making Poems," in American Poets in 1976, ed. William Heyen, p. 393). This form allows him to use other elements besides rhyme to balance his lines. Often, Stryk retains the "hit" or deepest image until the end of a line to maintain the tension. For example, "City of the Wind" (NFG, p. 31).

Stryk was also incorporating more daring and contemporary ideas into this new poetry. Often, techniques of modern world poets appear. In the powerful "The Mine: Yamaguchi," he reverses our expectations with a neo-Miltonic flair:

It is not hell one thinks of, however dark,
These look more weary than tormented.
One would expect, down there, a smell more human,
A noise more agonized than that raised
By cars shunted, emptied, brimmed again.

Today, remembering, the black heaps themselves
(On which conveyors drop, chip by chip,
What aeons vised and morselled to lay
A straw of light across the page)
Do not force infernal images.

After weeks of trying to forget,
The eye resists, the vision begged and gotten
Is the heart's: rows of women bent over
Feed-belts circling like blood, pickhammers
Biting at the clods that trundle by,
Raw hands flinging waste through scuttles gaped behind
While, a stone's-throw down the company road,
A smokestack grits the air with substance one
Might sniff below, or anywhere. It marks
The crematory, they pass it twice a day.

He leaves us with the absence, the crematory, the fatal, terse image that drives the message home. Stryk uses the image like a hammer to put the final plumb lines in our picture of the world. He makes it larger, too. We are allowed to experience a larger world, Japan, Spain, Persia, and in a more concrete way. The world comes alive in us through images like "rows of women bent over feedbelts circling like blood."

Stryk doesn't compromise himself by abandoning the music that is open to the craftsman of language. With the more concentrated "image unit," Stryk is more able to create a music that is not forced into a meter but, rather, free to find new rhythms and even change them when necessary. "The Fountain of Ammanati" is a perfect example of a rhythm as organic and natural as its topic:

No sneak-vialed aphrodisiac
Can do—for me, for you—what
Mermen pinching mermaids in a whack

Of sunlit water can. And do.

Internal rhymes are a much subtler device for Lucien Stryk's particular, sensitive voice. Free rhythms allow him to bring us his aesthetic peaks in poems like "The Fountain of Ammanati," "Delgusha Garden" or "Hearn in Matsue." In these poems, where the direct experience of art is expressed, the poems tend to become self-conscious. Perhaps, as Peter Michelson suggests in his review of Notes for a Guidebook (Chicago Review, No. 63, 1967) he looks too hard for images, a retainer from the older poems.

But, poems about art are perhaps the most difficult to write because they can easily become hollow and lacking in the real magic that lies underneath all great art. If there is anything more difficult than making a work of art, it must be making a good poem about art that hopes, itself, to be art. In "The Fountain of Ammanati," Stryk succeeds in bringing us a work that is constantly creating itself. I mean that in two ways: he creates the fountain for us as it is for himself, and he paints it so vividly that we can see it as a work of art that is changing its shape and making itself new. It is both ideal, as art, and real as it is experienced by the reader:

     "The Fountain of Ammanti"
     (Piazza della Signoria, Florence)

Below the pigeon-spotted seagod
The mermen pinch the mermaids,
And you shopgirls eat your food.

No sneak-vialed aphrodisiac
Can do—for me, for you—what
Mermen pinching mermaids in a whack

Of sunlit water can. And do.
These water-eaten shoulders and these thighs
Shall glisten though your gills go blue.

These bones will never clatter in the breath.
My dears, before your dust swirls either up
Or down—confess: this world is richly wet.

And consider: there is a plashless world
Outside this stream-bright square
Where girls like you lie curled

And languishing for love like mine.
And you were such as they
Until ten sputtering jets began
To run their ticklish waters down your

Spine. Munch on, my loves, you are but
Sun-bleached maidens in a world too poor

To tap the heart-wells that would flow,
And flow. You are true signorine
Of that square where none can go

And then return. Where dusty mermen
Parch across a strand of sails and spars,
And dream of foamy thighs that churn.

In "Delgusha Gardens," however, the true picture of the artistic sensibility is blurred by a series of allusions to the exotique. We have "bulbuls," "Aspens with Khyyam," "Ghengis Khan and Tamerlane," but the real concrete particulars don't appear until the very last stanza, when the living beings come into the picture:

The greatest discovery, however, is contained in the title poem. The literary and artistic allusions are present here too, but they are given room to explain themselves and, thus, don't stand out as flaws, but as genuine particulars. Donatello, Giotto and Dante are here in Padua; "the poet's cantos ring upon its walls." Art is truly felt as a physical part of the environment that can bring about permanent change in one's life. We are brought to Padua's majestic artworks and, yet, he brings us to look at ourselves in the end. Again, as in Rilke, we find that "you must change your life."

     "Notes For a Guidebook"

In celestial Padua
The ghosts walk hugely
In the public squares.
Donatelle is one,
His horseman in the
Piazza San Antonio
Guards the gruff saint's heart
Like a mystic ruby,
The ears of the horse,
Of the rider,
Riddled by prayer.

Giotto, Dante are others,
The painter's frescoes
Float like clouds
Above the city,
The poet's cantos
Ring upon its walls.

And what of us,
Who stand with heads
Strained back, feet tapping?
Shall we eat, sleep.
Be men again?
Shall we slip back

To the whores of Venice?—
Dwarfs, clods, motes of dust
In the brightness.

We learn by art a morality. The boundaries and assumptions of a poem, for example, outline a world that we enter, fully awake, with our consciousness. By presenting a spark of awareness or a selection of perceptions, the poet has a responsibility to literature, to the reader and to his world-vision. He must be immediate, honest and humble in relaying his world to us and confident of its self-perpetuation.

As readers, we have been faced with a challenging vista in poetry. Poets consistently try to recreate in us a new peak experience, the deep emotions and wild, joyous insights which the mind finds through contact with this earth. But we only react when the experience the poem relates is clear and acute like the life it is to become a part of. This requires a dedication on the part of the poet to being honest with himself and open to his reader. Stryk feels, "a man's poems must reveal the full range of his life, and hide nothing except the art behind them." Peter Michelson, in his review of Notes for a Guidebook (Chicago Review, pp. 117-128), cites Stryk for his moral vitality. This seems to stem from a de-emphasis on the ego that can be traced in his poems. The goal is then, to make a poetry that is not conscious of being art, one that is pointed in all directions, anxious after truth. Morally vital poetry is open-ended and willing to include the world as it is experienced. The contact is direct, unpretentious, and hopefully, egoless.

And for Stryk, at the very heart of his life, this speaking point is zenki, or the inner formlessness. This is the way in which the Zennist opens himself up to identify with an object. The ego is closed off and the art that is produced is spontaneous, open to explore the world in new ways without the burden of artifice. Again, from his interview with John Somer: "Poems written about others are good poems only when the writer becomes the other. In other words, he can't be anything other than selfless if he is to make important art." (CR, No. 88) Art cannot be bound up with an ego if it is to communicate directly to the reader. Awareness of the inner formlessness allows the artist to subdue the ego and crystallize a moment of consciousness on a canvas or a page. But a religion like Zen is not a tool for the betterment of one's poetry; it is a way of life that demands a severe dedication. And it is the dedication that helps the artist, not the philosophy, "if you are seriously interested in a philosophy or religion, then your art is bound to prosper because you are less self-absorbed."

In 1962, while Stryk was teaching in Yamaguchi, his fascination with Zen began to evolve into more than a fascination. Zenki becomes the cornerstone of an aesthetic that continues to develop in Stryk's work. He has been busy since then editing books of Zen literature and translating the poems of the greatest masters. This work begins now to couple with his own writing into one directed effort at relating the wonders of our own world to us in ways many Westerners have never before experienced. But this effort is a most difficult path. In Zen: Poems, Prayers, Sermons, Anecdotes, Interviews, he quotes a waka-poem by Kando (1825-1904) that sums up the difficulties:

It's as if our heads were on fire, the way
We apply ourselves to perfection of That.
The future but a twinkle, beat yourself,
Persist: the greatest effort's not enough.
(Zen, p. xxxiii)

Yet, the rewards can be astounding. Stryk's next book, The Pit and Other Poems, shares with us encounters of zenki with new levels of excitement and new heights of artistry. The images seem less strained, the situations less exotic and the particulars grow more vivid and warm. The book begins on a personal note with a poem of self-evaluation, "Oeuvre." He confronts himself with an openness and honesty that is exemplary, and also kind.

He shows his determination: "We build where and as we can." It is not a confessional poem and it is not an abstract poem, it remains somewhere in between: personal, positive and aware.

Next, he turns on himself again with a deeply meditative eye. The poem "Zen: The Rocks of Sesshu" is slow moving and ripe with deep images to create in us a meditative consciousness that handles the world slowly and delicately.

The Zen master Tenzen Yasuda in an interview from Zen: Poems, Sermons, Anecdotes, Interviews answered one of Stryk's more impetuous questions about Sesshu's rock garden by admonishing him to "sit in Zen for a long period before looking at the garden; then one might be able to look at it, as the old saying goes, 'with the navel.'" It is here that the poem begins to take shape, with the navel, within. We are given the leaning heads first, then told they are rocks. This presents us, not with a look at the objects, but as them. The poem doesn't merely speak of the life under the world we see, but makes us sense it with our own minds. The rocks here are not animated; rather they are animating. Sesshu's intention, perhaps, was to make us aware of the formless world we really live in by setting these rocks, this formlessness, "to stud our emptiness." The world is no longer closed in for Lucien Stryk, a variety" of lifestyles and perspectives emerge. And the earth is, above all, respected, as in the fifth part of "Zen: The Rocks of Sesshu":

It took years for Stryk to be able to complete this poem. It takes a long time for an aesthetic to take shape in an artist's life and work and time, also, for those individual works that express it most clearly to be written and perfected. As an artist, Stryk was constantly being molded by travel, experience, solitude and study. It is not merely coincidental that so many of Stryk's most important poems are drawn from his travels in Persia, Britain, and most significantly Japan, and the world of Buddhism. Notes for a Guidebook was completed along with Zen: Poems, Prayers, Sermons, Anecdotes, Interviews and Stryk was compiling World of the Buddha and After Images: Zen Poems of Shinkichi Takahashi while writing The Pit and Other Poems. This interchange is important to Stryk's work in a number of ways, but perhaps the breed of image that his poems often share with those of the Zennists.

The images that appear most often in Zen poems are those which try to include for the reader two worlds, as in this image from Takahashi's wonderful poem "Apricot": "and the bluest fish move through blue water— / a sign of pregnancy." The image can demonstrate the life that lies within the ordinary, a transcending depth that a contemplative mind and open eyes are able to reach. For a Zen man, the poem is a device for opening these depths to the reader, the uninitiated. This is a virtually impossible feat unless the poem contains the keen perception of particulars that can make a poem come alive in our minds, off the page. This kind of keen perception makes for a minimal, concise statement that has no room for many of the excesses of Western art. There is no apology, no explanation; the image does the work of combining two worlds into the one, and the image is left standing, the art becomes invisible.

Stryk, by this time in his career, is fully aware of the traces of art and is able to hide them or is bold enough to discard them. His poems take on a new vibrance and retain their taut, balanced structure. His images show no great strain, and they manage to contain a sense of the inner world as it views and encounters the outer one. Stryk's invisible art is not easily achieved. His years of apprenticeship with The Trespasser and his other earlier works have clearly paid off in his obvious craft. It is possible now for the craft and polish of the poem to make it indiscernible from the reality it speaks of and, thus, create a poem that is constantly reflecting the world. It is vital because it issues from a life infused with zenki, it sees the world anew with each glance. It is lyric and beautiful because it is made by a fine craftsman who wants very much for us to see the world anew. Stryk defines zenki for the poet as "spontaneous activity free of form, flowing from the formless self, leading to the bold thrust of his metaphor."Spontaneous action is crucial to the image that is to catch the senses at the moment of their blending and point out the contours in this worldly fabric. In the final section of "Zen: The Rocks of Sesshu," Stryk achieves both these effects in words like "gathered" and "firm again" and puts it all in a very delicate, very real, time frame of light images.

To discuss the work of Lucien Stryk and not mention his sensitive and definitive translations from the Japanese of both ancient and contemporary Zen poems would be to ignore the greatest "volume" of Stryk's work. His collaboration with Takashi Ikemoto is an inter-relationship of skills and strong exchange of ideas. Stryk summarizes this way: "he provided what I required, the gift to dig into the literature and select important examples, and perhaps he needed what I could offer, the skill to turn these things into hopefully, living English." (CR, p. 88) The task is obviously a difficult one, given the challenge of an art as bold as that produced through Zen. Stryk worries, himself, about the justice that can be done to the original. He feels that there is no way to translate the poetry of Zen, however, we can hope to transmute the poems to allow room for cross-cultural acceptance of the delicate and peculiar imagery. "You have to give the spirit of the original, but in doing that you must not add images or take images away… because, say cherry blossoms, has more mystic importance and resonance in Japanese than it does in English." (CR, p. 88) We can immediately see the :conflicts which must arise. However, with the confirmed Zen spirit of Ikemoto and the poetic sensibilities of Stryk, works like the Takahasi translations can come through to us with the vitality that an expression of zenki requires and they maintain a natural feel and rhythm as if they were fresh new poems written in English. In the poem 'Wind," the spirit of transformation is essential and its subtlety is elusive.

Give it words,
Stick limbs on it,
You won't alter essence
Whereas the wind—

I'll live gently
As the wind, flying
Over the town,
My chest full of sparrows.

The poem keeps a tight hold on this inner formlessness of both the self ("you won't alter essence") and the object the poet identifies with, wind ("my chest full of sparrows"). The poem allows the reader to feel a distinct presence. First a form is created in space by the "it" that is never clearly defined, yet exists, almost physically, by the third line. Inside that form we sense a complete vitality, and we are directed to an awareness of the poet's world-in-a-world. The beauty of the translation is in the fact that we are struck with the immediacy of effect that is difficult to obtain in the translations from any language, even German. The translation has the immediacy of a new poem in English. Stryk's perception of particulars and a genuine, sympathetic relationship with a work of art are the key factors here. In the Writer's Forum interview, Stryk remarks that "in order to translate well from a poet of this type, the feeling of kinship has to be very strong."

One must have a feel for the local color of the poet's world as well as this kinship. He asks further in the interview, "How can you expect one of the students who has only a postcard sense of that country to produce living poems for translation?" The translator's direct contact with the poet's referents and his image vocabulary is crucial to an effective translation. In many cases, the translator is physically stirred by this contact and his own poetic sensibilities may be aroused as well. Therefore, the study of any poet's work in view of his translations is always enlightening.

By the time he wrote Awakening, Lucien Stryk had won the Chicago Daily News Award for "A Sheaf for Chicago," written, edited or translated ten books and published important poems such as "Notes for a Guidebook," "Zen: The Rocks of Sesshu," "Oeuvre," and "The Pit." In more recent collections of his own verse there appears a solid core of poems that are set in the Midwest and speak of the people, the land, and the life there. Stryk concedes, "I am sometimes asked why in the face of such 'exotic' pursuits (as travel and translation) I have an interest in the poetry of my region—or, worse, why my own poetry is set for the most part in small-town Illinois. To one involved in the study of a philosophy like Zen, the answer to such questions is not difficult: one writes of one's place because it is in every sense as wonderful as any other, whatever its topography and weathers, and because one cannot hope to discover oneself elsewhere" (Heartland II: Poets of the Midwest, p. xxii). Stryk must set his poems down where they are found, as sinewy and stark as the landscape, but as warm and familiar as a hometown or a birthplace.

Knowing how closely a man's writing and his environment are tied together, we can see how a man like Stryk can never completely "go bamboo," as he calls it. As an American poet, and as a husband and father, he is found returning again and again to the poeple and the life immediately near. The awakened man will find the Illinois flatland full of beauty and awe as the foot of Mount Fuji. In the first Heartland anthology (1967), Stryk says that the poet can find poems everywhere he chooses to be "for what the land does not supply, his imagination will, and from the synthesis can come things rich and strange." One of the most important products to emerge from the synthesis in Stryk's own work is an openended image. By this I mean the image that not only contains a physical space and describes a relationship, but also points to the life that continues outside the poem itself, into the undiscovered world. This image leaves us with a sense that there exists more to the universe than we previously imagined, both visible and below the visible. In a poem like "Storm" we become aware of the vastness of the world described and of the life the place holds for us.

The green horse of the tree
bucks in the wind
as lightning hits beyond.
We will ride it out together,
or together fall.
(Awakening, p. 18)

The concision of these lines allows for the entry of the unknown. We see only what the lightning shows us. "The green horse of the tree" stands solitary in an undiscovered universe and all we know to feel is determination in the face of great mystery.

The regional poem comes alive in the particulars which appear on the surface of our vision. The regional poem is an inclusive thing that takes hold of people, weather and the special sounds in the air. In a poem such as "The Duckpond," we see these particulars as if within reach and, yet, are impressed with the way in which they stand above the inward, meditative tone that comprises the thrust and background of the vision. There are lawn-chairs and sunbathers, arguments and radio towers present, but the most obvious presence is the space that the images themselves contain.

The poem is populated and yet, through the use of clear natural imagery and concision, we see its meditative aspect and its stake in solitude. We are exposed to two perspectives in the second section, natural phenomena and its reflection of human religion, and our view of both is suddenly more acute. The open-ended image carries us deeper into our world.

Later in the poem, we see that what is learned in one place, even a duckpond, is the same message the earth sends out everywhere, "the pond sends news of the world" (VI, 1. 13, p. 40). In the final section, we see how the world is constantly in flux, changing from the inside out and acted upon from the outside in.

A poem like "The Duckpond" affects us so thoroughly because it speaks with directness, concision and gravity of the Zennist's art and, yet, its focus is the very life we lead as Americans, our land, our pain. Perhaps this book can best be seen if we view the poems it contains as a cycle of transcriptions of genuine experiences aimed at recreating in the reader a similar awareness, awe, or sick sadness. "In order to do so," Stryk says in his essay "Making Poems," "I would have to 'get beyond' poetry, put down without faking the truth of a young man's pain, which had nothing literary about it and was felt acutely over the years. A pain I was asked to share and still do." Stryk says this directly about "Letter to Jean-Paul Baudot, at Christmas," but it stretches over many of his poems that call on the strength of experience to make the poem a valid experience, also, for the reader. Perhaps the poet's own experiences are, after all, the only thing that is shared in poetry. We grow closer through what is to become a common experience.

Stryk says in the Chicago Review interview, "what I experience constitutes the range of my art." To bring us to his underlying feelings, he often writes of experiences that border, embarrassingly, on our own. When we see a poem like "Summer" that is full of the trivial bickering that keeps neighbors so perennially separate ("he shakes a fist at me / where I sit poeming / my dandelions, crab-grass and a passing dog"), we are struck by its complete grasp of the situation.

I like my neigbor, in his way
he cares for me. Look what
I've given him—something to feel superior to.
(Awakening, p. 27)

But what must move us, most surely, are his poems from fatherhood, from the heart of his life. These poems attempt a very special, very sensitive way of looking at the world. They remain simple poems, but they try to express identification with the child's frame of vision and emotion. He doesn't imitate the innocence of the child, but becomes, through zenki, united with the child's sensibilities. He, and we, see again in a new way. Perhaps the comedy and, then, the concern expressed in part VIII of "The Duckpond" can put us in contact with the child's world once again.

Stryk's work encompasses twenty-three years of changes in poetics, taste, religion and lifestyle. Opening his Selected Poems, just released by Swallow Press, is like entering a large room: some corners are dark, there are great sculptures in some, but all the windows open out on a great and wondrous world. It speaks strongly to us, as a great collection and stands as a self-confident effort to put us in contact with one life that contains a variety of experience and setting, a clear evolution of style and poetic strength, and a sympathetic, opened human awareness. This awareness opens up as trust in his reader and in his own experience, his own world view. Notice the privacy he can share in this previously uncollected poem, "Love Poem":

Startle my wife again—
"Where will we lay our bones?"
Harmless, you'd think, yet
she's berserk. "Mere joshing,"

I protest. She will not
listen. I want an island

for us, apart, ringed with stones,
clustering of flowers

merging us closer through
the all of time. She thinks

me mad with dreaming,
but it's love for her

which spurs me, this need
to know we'll never separate.

The confidence that this book has in us, as readers, is more than complimentary, it is challenging. We are being asked to have an encounter with an emotion and, from Stryk's point of view, the contact must be direct. He refuses to stifle feelings using convoluted language or elusive forms. His language must be crystallized and honest: "it's love for her / which spurs me, this need." As readers, we are responsible for suspending our disbelief at the expense of a possible awakening and taking all the risks that the poem deserves. The poet, in turn, is responsible for making our engagement with the life of the poem clear and meaningful. Only then, when all these conditions are met and all our ties broken for a moment, are we able to move our divergent minds "closer through / the all of time."

Stryk includes in Selected Poems sixteen previously uncollected poems, "Mask" from Taproot, "Scarecrow" from The Trespasser and the entire Notes for a Guidebook. These early books have been out of print for some time and what is reprinted here flows into the mainstream of Stryk's work. They shine with the artless and beguiling style that is present in the more recent works. But perhaps the choice of so few very early poems is not quite prudent on Stryk's part. In the whole of his writing, we can sense a series of great, daring changes which have formed a poet of rare stature and integrity. Here, however, the sense of constant change and development is de-emphasized by excluding a sampling of those early poems. His novice poems, poor though many of them are, do form the base for the music and the development of his "image unit" style in his later books. This portion of the Selected Poems leaves us in the dark where the rest of the book sheds a brilliant light on the world. Above all, this volume startles us awake to the presence of, as Anthony Piccione states in his review, "an American, guiding us easily again and again to the ordinary world we tend to loom past and wherein is lodged the undiscovered unity of all things" (CR, Vol. 28, No. 3, p. 201).

World literature in the twentieth century has undergone a revolution unlike anything since the Renaissance. Throughout Europe, the poets are driving themselves to bring out a poetry that is integral to the lives of their people. Poetry and art must now do more than entertain the reader or critic. The world is already overstimulated by media, art and entertainments. The aesthetic that arises is one that unifies peoples across language barriers by a common experience, a common consciousness, and a belief that we can all feel the same sensations underneath our masks of dogma and nationality.

Out of this desire has come a storm of anti-poems and aesthetic theories that are sent out from every corner to boggle the mind and transform sensibilities. But when the storm clears, the great artworks stand tall and their makers are remembered for their constant efforts at uniting people in a common consciousness. Figures like Montale, Herbert, Gabriella Mistral, Neruda and Rilke remain with us forever to point in their one direction: to hide the visible show of art and reveal underneath a beauty, an art of communication. And as each new writer begins to point in that direction, we must look closely again and again to where they point: to the ordinary world and to the love of this life. Looking at Lucien Stryk's direction, we see the shape his poems are making on the horizon: a single form, leading a minimal life, and forging for us a way of seeing the world together and of holding on to the edge.

     "The Edge"

Living that year at the edge
of the ravine,
sloped down to the woods, we listened

to the animals before the town
awoke, blurring
the limits of our days,

forcing its round, the needs
of others.
Near sleep, after loving, we felt

part of a stillness with the dark
and all its creatures,
holding to the edge of where we lived.
(Awakening, p. 44)