A Quartet of Poets Singing Solo

By Paul Gray

HENRY'S FATE by JOHN BERRYMAN

Selected by JOHN HAFFENDEN

94 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

$7.95.

Posthumous selections of unpublished poetry should be viewed suspiciously. The dead poet may have had good aesthetic reasons for keeping some of his work to himself. Fortunately, Henry's Fate does not malign the memory of John Berryman, who five years ago committed suicide at age 57. Critic John Haffenden has gathered 45 "Dream Songs" written after 77 Dream Songs (1964) and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968)--the two books that certified Berryman as a major American writer. Henry, the fast-talking middle-aged hero of the dream songs, continued to suffer and thrive in Berryman's imagination--and does so again in Henry's Fate.

The poet's alter ego travels to Venice. Henry worries over "his failing life, / his whiskey curse, his problems with his wife." He watches his young daughter grow older and thinks: "This is the end of Daddy, the shallowing of the depths of her childhood, when bearded Daddy was any." Though Berryman could movingly record Henry's despair at the deaths of friends, the poet could also tease his own creation:

Henry under construction was

Henry indeed:

gigantic cranes faltered under the

load,

spark-showers from the welding

played

with daylight, crew after crew

replaced each other like Kings,

all done anew

Daily, to the horror of the

gathering crowd

which gazed in a silence of awe

or sobbed aloud.

The 25 non-Henry poems included here lack some of this edgy vitality, although in the prologue to a work he never wrote, Berryman could open a prayer for inspiration in typically boisterous manner: "So screw you, Muses." Late in the book a poem begins "I didn't. And I didn't."--celebrating a suicide urge that the poet had resisted. Some 40 hours after he wrote these lines, Berryman did.

GEOGRAPHY III

by ELIZABETH BISHOP

50 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

$7.95.

The loudest complaint made about Elizabeth Bishop's poetry is that there is not more of it. The Complete Poems (1969) filled only about 200 pages, with margins to spare. Geography III adds ten more poems to the Bishop canon, and there are more than a few poets who would burn their manuscripts to have written one of them.

Bishop's power still rests in a cool lucidity, in a restraint that prevents word, phrase and sentence from doing more (or less) than is necessary. In some instances, only the typography indicates that she is writing poetry and not prose:

In Worcester, Massachusetts,

I went with Aunt Consuelo

to keep her dentist's appointment

and sat and waited for her

in the dentist's waiting room.

After this laconic beginning, Bishop needs only a prop--a copy of National Geographic--and a small cry of pain from the dentist's chair to create a child's epiphanic moment: "The waiting room was bright/ and too hot. It was sliding/ beneath a big black wave,/ another, and another."

Geography III includes touches of the exotic. Robinson Crusoe, old, embittered and safely beached in England, remembers his island:

And I had waterspouts. Oh,

half a dozen at a time, far out

they 'd come and go, advancing

and retreating,

their heads in cloud, their feet in

moving patches

of scuffed-up white.

At its frequent best, such verse raises fresh expectations and then wholly satisfies them.

THE COMPASS FLOWER

by W.S. MERWIN

94 pages. Atheneum. $4.95.

This book should win W.S. Merwin, 49, some new fans, especially on college campuses, where he is already a big draw. It may also trouble some older admirers. Ever since his Asian Figures (1973), a collection of sayings from the Korean, Philippine, Chinese and Japanese, Merwin's imagination has been racing eastward. The effect on his poetry is often a studied inscrutability--purposeful but somehow aimless journeys through a landscape of clouds and mountains. Some of his poems seem like private mantras: "Dark rain at/ winter solstice/ and in the morning/ rosemary under clear sky/ bird on south doorstep/ poised like a stone."

When Merwin descends to rub his language against the here and now, sparks can fly, as in a poem called "Fishing":

Day and night as a child

I could imagine feeling the bite

on the line

moment of fire

above a drum of white

stone water...

But the bulk of The Compass Flower seems too serene to rid itself of fatigued images ("autumn leaves," "salt of the earth") or to prove that its serenity has been earned by struggle. Many Western ears will find it hard to tell whether Merwin is being vatic or phatic.

BEGINNING WITH O

by OLGA BROUMAS

70 pages. Yale University Press. $6.95.

$2.95 paperback.

In her first book (and the new volume in the Yale Series of Younger Poets), Greek-born Olga Broumas, 27, displays both reckless energy and passion. Her subject is sexual love between women, and her allusions range from the classical goddesses through fairytale heroines to such contemporary poets as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. The poems portray lesbianism as a brave new world, a terrain that women have been tricked (by themselves and men) into avoiding. To the uncertain, Broumas offers a refuge in eroticism:

I take your hand

hesitant still with regret

into that milky landscape, where

braille

is a tongue for lovers, where

tongue,

fingers, lips

share a lidless eye.

Such passages confidently approach a Sapphic sensuality. Broumas is less successful in translating polemic into poetry. "I am," she writes,

a woman co-opted by promises:

the lure

of a job, the ruse of a choice, a

woman forced

to bear witness, falsely

against my kind, as each

other sister was judged

inadequate, bitchy,

incompetent,

jealous, too thin, too fat.

This can be and has been said better. Broumas is entitled to her argument, but her poetry argues best when it does not protest too much.

Paul Gray

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