[In the following essay, Brinnin provides a positive assessment of Hazard, The Painter.]

Unlike most collections of poems, this one has a named hero and an overt subject. The hero is an aging liberal, a painter called Hazard; the subject is Hazard's attempt somehow to maintain himself as one who “participates in the divinity of the world.” But we meet him at a bad time, when his hopes are dashed, his guard down. While the newly victorious Nixon gang is putting it together and the kid next door with her Rolling Stones on stereo is getting it together, Hazard is trying simply to keep it together. Work at his easel should help, but even that has hit a bad patch—for two years now “he has been painting, in a child's palette /—not the plotted landscape that holds dim / below him, but the human figure dangling safe, / guyed to something silky, hanging there, / full of half-remembered instruction / but falling, and safe.” This surrogate man in midair neither splashes down into legend like Icarus nor lands on his feet behind enemy lines. His mortal trouble is that he's “safe”—in two-car creature comforts, an enduring marriage and the restraints of his own good nature.

“The political references in the poem,” says the author in a foreword, “date it like the annual rings of a weed-tree.” Since his statement also suggests that all of these poems are units of one poem, we might best take him at his word and, in the absence of any conventional sort of continuity, regard each poem as a panel in a large design. Then the poem's decisive moment can be located in the panel entitled “Nixon's the One” and its thematic center in the lines “November 8, a cold rain. Hazard discovered / on the blacktop driveway, trying to get the McGovern- / Shriver stickers off his '65 Ford.” His country has “bitterly misspoken itself,” Hazard feels, but “alone in the defoliated landscape … the patrol he scouted with, wiped out,” he is ready to face up and carry on. He can't resist making up wry little epithets—“we elect to murder, we murder to elect”—but his mood is largely one of acquiescence as he shuffles through the shades of a “late imperial decline” to his “old barn with a stove.”

A thoroughly domesticated man, Hazard looks upon his material goods as “some godless benediction,” and never betrays the fact that his role of paterfamilias in a household where children complain of too much pepper in the gravy is an imposture assumed out of weariness and decency. His “real” life lies in his aspiration to fix an image on canvas and in his struggle to make a kind of peace with a history of defeated possibilities. “He is in charge of morale in a morbid time,” he has seen “what twenty years will do / to untended shrubbery and America,” and to himself.

“Resemblances between the life and character of Hazard and those of the author are not disclaimed,” says Meredith, “but are much fewer,” he continues with a teasing twist, “than the author would like.” Read poet for painter, and the changes that can be rung on identity quickly present themselves. The delicate social conscience of the man Meredith gives us is convincing, but his credibility as an artist is not. His one obsessive subject is more of a poet's concept than a painter's pictorial “fact,” and the pictures registered in his memory are sometimes uneasily close to those of a Norman Rockwell nudged by Social Realism. In poetic terms, Meredith takes us into a region recently charted by the knuckleboned asperities of Robert Lowell and by the vaudeville turns of conscience played out in the “Dream Songs” of John Berryman. If such influences pave his way, they do so without getting in his way. Meredith's language is often as lean as Lowell's and as rhythmically adroit as Berryman's. His tone has the consistency of an achieved mode and, true to the temper of his hero, he is modestly colloquial even when imagination strains for release into the upper air of rhetoric. What has allowed Meredith to take his bearings from these other poets without being driven off his own course is perhaps his wider tolerance for human inadequacy and his ability to dramatize personal dilemma without seeming to exploit it. Whatever of “the sacred rage” remains in Hazard finds outlet not in tantrums of self-concern but in the painful, merry despair of accommodation to “things as they are.”

Meredith's poem is a journey: from the dining room table to a hall of dinosaurs to the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. Since Hazard is at once our cicerone and the principal actor at every station of the cross, by the time we're back home we know what to expect of him. There, stretched out on a Rhode Island beach where a Yale girl is taking care of his children, he has a Yeats-like vision of sensuality in the waves which, for a moment, we think may be redeeming. But Hazard is not Yeats, and what he sees is something less than a lyrical consort of nymphs and satyrs. “Porpoise Hazard,” we learn, “watches himself awhile, like a blue movie.” When, finally, the last line of the book tells us that he's “back at work,” we still don't hold much hope for that pesky painting. But to the words in which his author sums up his character and affirms his unfinished task we are apt to assent or, like Hazard himself, acquiesce: “Gnawed by a vision of rightness / that no one else seems to see, / what can a man do / but bear witness?”