G. E. Murray
Robert Pack's Keeping Watch reveals not only the presence of a gifted writer but a gifted man, steadfast and insightful. With this, his seventh book, Pack finally and fully unearths his truest resources in family and homestead, while channelling the currents of his warm and level voice into episodes as large as song. He has in the past spent the blood of many poems searching the nature of his bloodline, particularly the troublesome spectre of his father. But in his last book, Nothing But Light (1974), there was evidence of a swing in perspective from the poet-as-son to the poet-as-father. And with Keeping Watch, the movement is reinforced and elaborated…. This is the tough stuff of which Pack is recently about. It's a mood most strikingly revealed in "Pruning Fruit Trees," where the poet reconciles self with the sources of self. It is only incidentally about trimming trees, of course, as is illustrated by this advice: "The cut must be made close / to the parent limb / following the angle / of its growth":
Don't be afraid to cut—that's it,
cut more, it's good for the tree,
lengthening life,
making its fruit full.
A farmer told me to talk
to the trees. Tell them
"this is good for you."
Speak softly, thank them.
The question of fatherhood remains central to Robert Pack's verse, but this role is now marked by acumen rather than angst. The effect, I believe, is to move from the exclusivity of an interior world and to place concretely before us a world of empathy and understanding. This is especially so in "Elegy for a Warbler," where the poet sensitizes a brief moment with his daughter, against whose bedroom window "the warbler has broken / its small life," and for whom "All her immaculate dolls now weep." Pack resolves the bird's death in a fashion that avoids both sentimentality and overt didacticism…. (pp. 967-68)
Nearly one-fifth of Pack's collection is occupied by a work titled "Maxims in Limbo," a loosely-connected series of 101 epigram/ adages, not unlike the lyrical notes and sayings found in the Adagia section of Wallace Stevens' Opus Posthumous. (p. 968)
Pack's poetry develops through intricate, sometimes deceptively concrete, structures of language which attempt to comprehend the complex physical and emotional interweavings of his ideas. Now, after working carefully and steadily through a decade of revelatory changes in matter exposition, Robert Pack is proving to be an exhilarating and haunting poet. (p. 969)
G. E. Murray, in The Georgia Review (copyright, 1977, by the University of Georgia), Winter, 1977.
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