[In the following review, Pettingell calls Tide and Continuities: Last and First Poems 1995-1938 "a versatile and entertaining book" and suggests that the poetry in this volume represents the culmination of Viereck's career.]

For almost 60 years the indefatigable Peter Viereck has honed his wit and offered shrewd cultural judgments in spirited formal verse. Born in the same decade as Dylan Thomas and Robert Lowell, Viereck has lived through the era of neometaphysical poetry bristling with Donne-ish puns and Audenesque prosodie pyrotechnics, then that of Minimalist blank verse and plain speaking, and into the current return to Romantic expansiveness. His declared last collection, Tide and Continuities: Last and First Poems 1995-1938 is introduced by the late Joseph Brodsky in an appropriately poetic Foreword.

An introduction to a book
of poetry must have a look
of poetry. I thought a lyric
befits this work by Peter Viereck,
perhaps the greatest rhymer of
the modern period, a prof
of history at Mount Holyoke College
famed for its feminists and foliage.

And so forth for 10 more rollicking stanzas. Brodsky, like Viereck, knew how effective doggerel can be. Sadly, in our own day, we associate its mongrel meter and jangly rhymes with the work of inept poetasters and saccharine greeting-card verses.

In previous centuries, though, major poets employed it for satiric effect, or to convey a homespun quality. Byron and Browning were adepts. American poets particularly excelled at doggerel: James Russell Lowell's "A Fable for Critics" sustained it for several cantos. The form probably reached its apogee between the final decades of the last century and the early part of this one with the popularity of such newspaper columnist poets as Eugene Field, Gelett Burgess (of "Purple Cow" fame), Guy Wetmore Carry I, and Don Marquis—inventor of the irrepressible literary cockroach, archy, and his pal the upbeat alley cat, mehitabel.

Doggerel's effects are often comic, but they also allow for philosophical musings, mockery and even a species of folksy pathos. In today's painfully earnest critical climate, though, it can be hard to scrape up an audience for any humorous verse. Viereck and Garrison Keillor may be the only well-known writers who still love doggerel, and probably no one has put it through more paces than Viereck. In doing so, he proves once again its flexibility and emotional resonance.

Tide and Continuities (a rather academic title for such a versatile and entertaining book) begins with the poet's most recent work. Much of it deals with mythic themes of death and resurrection, and an initial series of poems, including "Dionysus in Old Age," retells the story of Persephone, daughter of Ceres, goddess of the harvest. In the original, the young maiden was raped by Pluto and forced to live as his queen in the underworld, but her sorrowing mother refused to make the crops grow until her child was restored. The gods came up with a compromise that returned Persephone to the world of earth and sky for six months of each year, ensuring summer's abundance before her inevitable disappearance to the subterranean land of the dead. Aboveground, she becomes, according to some versions of the myth, the bride of Dionysus, god of the grape—who is associated with resurrection too, since he was torn to pieces before coming back to life, just as vines must be pruned back to sticks at the end of the season in order to grow more abundantly the next year.

Viereck is fascinated by this peculiar ménage-à-trois in which intoxicated Dionysus must share his sweetheart (a stand-in for the poet's muse) with Death himself. These riveting poems are always laughing through tears of pain, humiliation, frustrated rage, and fear. Thus Viereck's version of the tale begins with an explanatory note: "Not theological nor supernatural in its myth-echoes, the poem relates Dionysus [here "Mr. Dionysus Jones"] and Persephone to the old folklore humor of the traveling salesman and the farmer's daughter."

But gradually the speaker becomes the voice of the scribbler as well, addressing his "belle dame sans merci' muse." The poem's Dionysus, "an aging shabby wine salesman and magician, feeling vine's autumn," sometimes breaks into musical comedy-style arias with grace notes of Cole Porter or Noel Coward in bittersweet mode:

Poignant: this autumn aura, this afterglow half shed,
No matter which orphaned flora (youth, lust, or primavera)
I hoard. And the end hard.
—But harder this poignance, whittled by my rhymes …
Fall is the heartbreak Her Niobe-heart can't bear.
Halt—can you hear me?—you falling leaf up there;
Halt in mid-air.

Unimpressed by his sentimentality, Persephone belts out her numbers like Ethel Merman, in "Goat Ode in Mid-Dive" (the word "tragedy" derives from a Greek word meaning "goat song"). He has displayed resentment because she only gets to spend six months of the year above-ground with him before she must return to Hades. However, she puts him in his place:

"Don't map me as femme-fatale-ing all over the place.
I'm too solid for fluffy romantic props.
Not many a belle-dame-sans is also a nanny.
With my glamorless chore of baby-sitting the crops,
I'm hard-core no-nonsense ore….
I'm slapdash life, not school. No guild
Can build on my quicksilver quicksand base,
I dodging your x-rays paraphrase….
I'm whirls of myth and science
Through wheels of song and silence.

Pluto can't keep his mitts off me; he's conned
By all that's round."

Fed up with his attempts to poeticize her, she tells him, "nothing wows me but the commonplace." The two of them are, as the poet has her put it, "Viereck's puppets"—an objectification of his musings about cycles of creative activity and lying fallow, together with apprehensions of his own approaching extinction. Finally, in "Pluto Incognito," the poet concludes that his appropriation of the mythic story is akin to

A grandma fabling for children.
This is the ancient tale of the three.
This is the future tale of the trillion.
The children, bored (they'd rather play soccer),
Retell it blurred, with new myth garnished.
Smelling of urine and roses, clasping a nursing-home garland,
Alzheimer'd granny is fabling on her rocker:
Tales truer for being garbled.

So each new teller of the universal myths of our culture changes the plot a bit in order to highlight an aspect hearers may have missed in earlier recountings, until human voices fall silent and our alphabets become meaningless scratchings.

Against all odds, Viereck has been inspired by what he wryly calls "those gifts reserved for age." They include not merely illness ("the conqueror germ" in Viereck's parlance) and failing memory, but also what T.S. Eliot identified as "the conscious impotence of rage / At human folly, and the laceration / Of laughter at what ceases to amuse."

Hospitals appear as a kind of Hades from which, in common with Persephone, we hope to be freed after a season; sickness as a condition we yearn to recover from, made whole again like dismembered Dionysus. The first, and most recently written, section of the book begins with a long poem, "At My Hospital Window," tracing the effects of a critical illness Viereck suffered a few years ago.

Among many other matters, the poem contemplates the effect morphine (given as a painkiller) has on the imagination. "I, too, have Xanadus," viereck remarks, alluding to Coleridge's drug-induced "Kubla Khan." No wonder the poet has Dionysus complain in one of the Perse-phone poems that his beloved is "now hooked on wines of entropy booze; / She brews them from poppies, not vines" to become a psychedelic hippie maenad, prone to dark hallucinations and violence.

Not all Viereck's poems have such an epic quality. Sprinkled throughout Tides and Continuities are short lyrics in a variety of forms: Sapphics, odes, ballads, almost-sonnets of 13 lines. Viereck includes elegies for his father and for a brother killed fighting the Nazis in Italy. Nijinsky carols from his Swiss madhouse, Venus in a music hall plays Mary Magdalene as "Maggie Jones." Love poems abound, but so do satires with titles like "Now that Holocaust and Crucifixion are Coffee-Table Books." Science sings antistrophe to Myth's strophe. In "The Green Menagerie," speakers "include DNA, potato, cactus, stone, and water, as well as occasional human voices."

The final section of this volume returns to the Dionysus/Persephone story, and to even darker observations about the end of life. The god is now identified with Orpheus and Christ—also with Arthur Rimbaud and his drunken boat. His partner links herself with everyone from Eve and the Virgin Mary to Joan of Arc, "Madame Ovary," and the girl-who-can't-say-no.

By turns irreverently philosophical or laughingly tragic, Viereck's puppets dance the spiraling rounds of historical revolutions and human stages of development. Sometimes their puppeteer makes them deliberately artificial, like the stock characters of commedia dell' arte. Other times, he moves their strings in a way that makes them affectingly lifelike. Doggerel mixes with the sublime to create a thoroughly contemporary poetry. In his long career, Peter Viereck has saved his best for the last, and his contribution to this ancient story needs to be heard.