[In the following review, Yenser considers the enigmatic language, gritty tone, and thematic sweep of Warren's collection Or Else.]

Sometimes it is the way the tone changes and sometimes the way the syntax explicates itself and often the way the figures follow—but throughout his recent book Robert Penn Warren keeps the reader just off balance. The conclusion of the first poem, “The Nature of a Mirror” (which might have been subtitled And Vice Versa, it so neatly compacts the now proverbial dictum into a tautology), will exemplify a part of what I mean:

                                                                                                                                                      the sun,
Beyond the western ridge of black-burnt pine stubs like
A snaggery of rotten shark teeth, sinks
Lower, larger, more blank, and redder than
A mother's rage, as though
F. D. R. had never run for office even, or the first vagina
Had not had the texture of dream. Time
Is the mirror into which you stare.

Surely at a first reading of these lines most of us will find ourselves blinking, and perhaps thinking of those chain poems that go the rounds, as Warren slips from graphic image through what looks like surrealism to didactic abstraction. Yet it all happens as effortlessly as the light changes, so that one finds the incongruities growing superficial. In fact, the passage may fascinate primarily because it exposes a radically unified complex—unified, that is, at some level deep enough to make even the term vagina dentata seem relevant. But useless. If the passage needed glossing, perhaps the shortest way would be by means of another that comes from enigmatic depths. At hand is Cavafy's marginal comment on Ruskin: “When we say ‘Time’ we mean ourselves. Most abstractions are simply pseudonyms. It is superfluous to say ‘Time is scytheless and toothless.’ We know it. We are time”.

A more manageable example of the unexpectedness one comes to expect in a Warren poem concludes “There's a Grandfather's Clock in the Hall:”

But, in any case, watch the clock closely. Hold your breath and wait.
Nothing happens, nothing happens, then suddenly, quick as a wink, and
                                                                                          slick as a mink's prick, Time
                                                                                                                        thrusts through the time
                                                                                                                                                      of no-Time.

While it might be true, as a character in Middlemarch argues, that all speech is slang and poets' speech the strongest slang of all, it is certainly true, Warren continually reminds us, that much strong slang is poetic in the first place. But of course the real strength of this passage lies not in its quotation of the poetry of the vulgate but rather in the audacity of its couplings, first of the two clichés (with their slyly nictitating internal rhymes) and second of this brace of clichés with the abstract notion. Less effective conjunctions of modes help to structure “Vision Under the October Mountain: A Love Poem” where overripe, Hopkinsesque images give way to a dryasdust, professorial language, and “Interjection #2: Caveat,” which begins in philosophical savvy and ends in mystical delight.

In “News Photo,” a poem about a Southerner who has killed a minister “Reported to Be Working Up the Niggers”, Warren modulates his point of view continually and with a marvelous delicacy. The protagonist gets one long unmediated speech (a tour de force as irritatingly comic in its malicious prejudice as anything in Faulkner), and throughout the rest of the poem we move from an ironic detachment into the killer's confused self-righteousness and back again by passages as uncanny as those in Escher. The poem ends with a section in which Warren first imagines the acquitted killer fantasizing a congratulatory appearance by Robert E. Lee and then converts this benevolent revenant into the skeleton in the closet of the South, before whose sardonic laugh “every pine needle / on that side of every pine tree” across half the state “shrivels up as though hit by a blowtorch” while “the white paint on / the State House—it pops up and blisters”:

                    he's laughing, he
shakes all over with laughing, he
rattles like a crap game on a tin roof, he
is laughing fit to kill, or would be
if he weren't dead already. But
there are tears in his eyes, or
at least would be, if
he had any.
Any eyes, I mean.

That wry, even anti-sentimental tone is characteristic, as are the liking for the frisson and the line break that fragments the syntactical unit. Such recurrent factors notwithstanding, this sequence of poems, like many in it, is protean. “Natural History,” a small parable of the unbearable strangeness of pure understanding and love, is so different, not only from the other poems touched on above but from most poems, that it embarrasses the terms one would praise it in. If it were a sculpture, it would be made of some radiant otherworldly metal, seamless, obeying conventions clearly strict but obscure. Quoting in part would be unconscionable. Then there is the perversely entitled “I Am Dreaming of a White Christmas: The Natural History of a Vision,” the first seven sections of which read weirdly like a scenario of a silent underground film, the camera never panning but instead closing first on one object and then another in the house, as it turns out, of the poet's youth. Everything is where it would have been, say, sixty years ago—but most of it, including the poet's parents, has been decaying for sixty years. A long build culminates in the eighth part when the speaker (the eldest of three children) discovers three red chairs:

They're empty, they're empty, but me—oh, I'm here!
And that thought is not words, but a roar like wind, or
The roar of the night-freight beating the rails of the trestle,
And you under the trestle, and the roar
Is nothing but darkness alive. Suddenly,
Silence.

That odd and moving poem is followed by “Interjection #3; I Know a Place Where All Is Real,” a tame, hedging allegory that might have been written by—why, almost anyone, the gist of a part of it notwithstanding: “Access is not easy, the way / rough, and visibility extremely poor, especially / among the mountains”. “Ballad of Mister Dutcher and the Last Lynching in Gupton,” on the other hand, is a narrative that almost anyone would like to have written—or at least would like to have the skill to have written. Whatever made Warren think that he could adapt its idiomatic gait to a syllabic line is a mystery, but the result—the line breaks punctuating the narrative with the deliberateness of the shifting of a chaw or the stroke of the whittling knife—is a small triumph.

Warren also includes the fine “Homage to Theodore Dreiser,” several love poems drawn from two earlier works, a poem about Flaubert, and many others just as apparently diverse—and yet, we are told in a curiously phrased prefatory note à la Lowell, “This book is conceived as a single long poem composed of a number of shorter poems as sections or chapters”. Indeed, what must be considered the central poems are numbered I through XXIV, while interspersed among them are “interjections”, numbered 1 through 8. The latter term cannot but suggest the tentativeness of whatever unity exists here, but by the same token it is clear that one is meant to discern a main current. Well, one does, and its source is “The compulsion to try to convert what now is was / Back into what was is”. Those lines come from “Rattlesnake Country,” which in spite of distracting echoes of Faulkner is one of the most powerful poems here. It consists of memories of time spent on a desert ranch in the company, among others, of a half Indian hand called Laughing Boy, whose early morning duty and pleasure it is to keep the ranch house lawn free of the rattlers that sleep there each night. Laughing Boy executes his charge with ingenuity, first dousing a snake with gasoline and then snapping a match alight:

                                                                                The flame,
If timing is good, should, just as he makes his rock-hole,
Hit him.
The flame makes a sudden, soft, gaspy sound at
The hole-mouth, then dances there. The flame
Is spectral in sunlight, but flickers blue at its raw edge.
Once I get one myself. I see, actually, the stub-buttoned tail
Whip through pale flame down into earth-darkness.
“The son-of-a-bitch,” I am yelling, “did you see me, I got him!”
I have gotten that stub-tailed son-of-a-bitch.

Magnificently told, this incident brings together an initiation into the temporal world (for what else can that youthful crime on that “One little patch of cool lawn” in that “long-lost summer” suggest?) and the transcendence of it. In the next section, Warren will say “What was is is now was” and then ask “But / Is was but a word for wisdom, its price?” That was is at least that, and a fortiori that was is, are propositions underwritten by the synthesis, as it were, of the two verbs in the noun's first syllable. But the snake has ogygian associations with time as well as with wisdom, and here the snake seems to be destroyed. In other words, the raconteur's sense of “timing” is only one reason that this passage is in the present tense; another is that in it was becomes is. The flaming rattler embodies that conversion, just as its disappearance down the hole (a fine touch) insists on what we might call the immortality of time.

Implicit in many of these poems, the world of “no-Time” figures explicitly in “Small White House,” “Sunset Walk in Thaw-Time in Vermont,” and “There's a Grandfather's Clock in the Hall.” The latter opens with a miniature Whitmanesque catalogue of meticulously jumbled events:

There's a grandfather's clock in the hall, watch it closely. The
                                        minute hand stands still, then it jumps, and
                                                  in between jumps there is no-Time,
And you are a child again watching the reflection of early
                                        morning sunlight on the ceiling above your bed,
Or perhaps you are fifteen feet under water and holding your breath as
you struggle with a rock-snagged anchor, or holding
                    your breath just long enough for one more long,
                              slow thrust to make the orgasm really
                                                            intolerable. …

That “no-Time” is not simply an ironic term is guaranteed by the nature of the catenated incidents, which are as remarkable for their metaphorical relationships among themselves as for their relationship to the movement of the minute hand. Here Warren has hit upon the perfect device for establishing simultaneously the discreteness and continuity of events in the world and for representing in a linear, schematic fashion the weave of temporal and eternal that has its inevitably flawed analogue in the texture of this volume.

There are more burls than necessary in the fabric. Neither “Flaubert in Egypt,” which incidentally owes a lot to Francis Steegmuller's book of the same title, nor “Interjection #4: Bad Year,” “Bad War: a New Year's Card,” “1969,” nor “Little Boy and Lost Shoe” contributes much to this “single long poem”. But for the most part these poems do seed and ramify one another, so that although much of “the evidence / Is lost” (IV), we have a sense, as from mosaic bits still in place, of a whole, which is at once “the original dream which / I am now trying to discover the logic of” (V) and the book that Warren might have written had he already discovered that logic. For example: the fire into which the poet stared (III) recalls the owl's eyes that “Burn gold” in the same poem and, while the owl's eyes reflect the gold eyes of the cat that kills the chipmunk (XVIII), both images remind us that “Time / Is the mirror into which you stare” (I), as well as that Warren repeatedly equates the “eye” and the “I”. The “clock somewhere … trying to make up its mind to strike forever o'clock” (IX) becomes the rattler that might strike (X), while the burning snake takes the form of both the “glory” that flares up “from the filth of the world's floor” (the passage in “Interjection #7” imitates God's Grandeur) and of Dreiser (“Full of screaming his soul is, and a stench like live flesh that scorches”—XI), and Dreiser himself (who “cannot theorize past / The knowledge that / Others suffer, too, at last”) mirrors the poet, who understands even the unhappiness of the man who has killed the minister. That man is related to the poet, not necessarily because the latter has killed (it was after all only a rattler, and the possible connections—between Laughing Boy's killing of the snakes and his later killing of a man, between the “white man's whiskey” that facilitates the homicide and the Indian's gasoline—need not be stressed), but simply because, rather like the Lowell of History, having looked so long into the mirror of time, he has begun to find humanity's features in his own: “The sky has murder in the eye, and I / Have murder in the heart, for I / Am only human. / We look at each other, the sky and I” (I—in the following poem, characteristically, Warren mocks his preceding conclusions).

In the mirroring sky appear numerous birds of prey: the owl that seizes the field mouse (III), the kestrel (IV), the eagle (XVIII), the hawk (XXIV). And while it is easy enough to see how the tracks of the mouse in the snow become the words of the poet on the page of his life (III), it is also necessary to understand that, in a world “In which all things are continuous” (V), the owl and man are somehow related. Or Else. The various relationships among the parts of Warren's world are not always clearly formulated, and for that we can be thankful, since we can rest assured that he will continue to be engaged in “the process whereby pain of the past in its pastness / May be converted into the future tense / Of joy” (V).