VERSES OF THINGS PAST

NEW POEMS BY GEOFFREY HILL, DEREK WALCOTT, AND FRANK BIDART

Author: By Andrew Frisardi

Date: SUNDAY, October 12, 1997

Page: E1

Section: Books

Much of Hill's poetry is an impassioned argument with history, a criticism of the collective self-deceptions and hypocrisies that underlie social disintegration. In ``De Jure Belli Ac Pacis'' (a sequence of eight sonnets), for example, Hill censures the merely economic basis of contemporary European union, contrasting it with the idealism that united Germans who resisted Hitler, who hazarded ``the proscribed tongue / of piety and shame'' and were martyred for their courage. The contemporary politicians and entrepreneurs who engineered the Maastricht Treaty, on the other hand, are dismissed as ``highminded / base-metal forgers of this common Europe'' -- with the puns, of course, on ``common'' and ``forgers.'' Elsewhere in the book, Hill invokes Renaissance humanists, European modernist poets, statesmen, Old Testament prophets, political theorists, and 17th-century English Puritans.

There are series of poems about the conflict between individual and social concerns; the historical failures of the English church (Hill is English, although he's been living in Boston since 1988); the survival of spiritual impulses in a spiritually bankrupt present; Dantesque invectives against church and state; and the like. One of our most profoundly religious poets -- all the more so because he eschews easy solutions and formulations -- Hill has steadily countered fashionable nihilism with a sense of tragedy and the sublime rare in post-World War II art: ``then, now, in eternum, the spirit bears witness / through its broken flesh: / to grace more enduring even than mortal corruption, / ineradicable, and rightly so.''

``The only art left is the preparation of grace,'' writes Derek Walcott early on in ``The Bounty,'' his first collection of poetry since he won the Nobel Prize, in 1992 -- and then he proceeds, as energetically and artfully as ever, to explore the preeminent themes of old age: reevaluation of one's life and work, death of family and friends, greater awareness of the transience of everything one has learned to call ``mine.'' Like Yeats, another laureate who sustained in later years the aggressive physicality of making art, Walcott confronts his own mortality even as he engages and identifies with the inexhaustible life ``the breadfruit [tree] opens its palms in praise of.''

The book's title section is a sevenpart elegy for the poet's mother. Ever one to dive deeper into both (or more) sides of a contradiction, Walcott confesses the limitations of expressing grief through the discipline of his craft: ``I watch these lines grow and the art of poetry harden me / into sorrow as measured as this.'' Finally, the act of mourning is itself the greatest consolation for death: ``Our dread of distance,'' of the unbounded infinity the grave opens up, needs tears to provide ``a horizon, / a dividing line that turns the stars into neighbors.''

The reality of endings -- much of the rest of the book elegizes other friends and acquaintances, including Joseph Brodsky -- not only stirs Walcott to search for language to express the nothingness that is all his skeptical intellect can know about the afterlife; it provokes him to reexamine his own origins. Walcott is a black poet from the West Indies -- one who embraces Old World European culture and language, even as he likens himself to Adam naming the Edenic natural features of Santa Lucia -- and the subject of identity has always been at the very center of his imagination. Now, however, having engaged the wider world so fully through his art, he compares himself to Oedipus in old age, who must learn ``to go nowhere,'' having nothing left to prove. He senses it is time, or it will be soon, to ``let [his] knuckled toes root deep in their own soil.'' ``Never get used to this,'' he says of his home. ``This is why you have ended, to pass, / praising the feathery swaying of the casuarinas / and those shudderings of thanks that so often descended.''

Frank Bidart is best known for his long dramatic poems portraying the interior worlds of characters overpowered by irrational, taboo urges and conflicts. In these explorations of the emotional extremes and compulsions that often determine our lives -- of ``fate embedded in the lineaments of desire'' -- Bidart employs unconventional punctuation and typography, and minute introspective detail, to create concise and engaging narratives, rich in ambiguity, emotional accuracy, and subtle insight. The music and language in Bidart's poetry, on the other hand, have often been less striking than its observations. Too often, a dearth of verbal energy and inventiveness, a poetics of Williamsesque plain speech that often seems merely bland and prosy, has resulted in passages practically indistinguishable from ordinary psychological case studies.

The second section of ``Desire,'' making up more than half the book, is a long poem that fits the above description, but with some additional elements carried over from Bidart's ``In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90.'' The earlier volume concluded with ``The First Hour of the Night,'' a dream narrative in the tradition of Piers Plowman allegorizing the bankruptcy of Western philosophy. It seems that Bidart has been expanding his examination of personal darkness to see it in its historical and mythic context. Most of ``The Second Hour of the Night,'' in the current volume, is a retelling of Ovid's narrative about Myrrha, mother of Adonis, whose lust for her father was eventually consummated -- after which she petitioned the gods for a state neither alive nor dead and so was transformed into the myrrh tree, whose resin is bittersweet like desire. Naturally, this tale is an apt one for Bidart, and his telling of it is full of the usual psychological particulars, analytical digressions, and well-paced narrative -- along with some descriptive passages that seem more cursory and prosy. Bidart resembles a Greek tragedian more than Ovid in his emphasis on the story's darkness: ``no creature is free to choose what / allows it its most powerful, and most secret, release.''

The rest of the book comprises 13 poems -- 12 lyrics and a narrative based on Tacitus. Stylistically, these lyrics are similar to the new poems in ``Western Night,'' and to the short sections that start and finish ``Second Hour'': fragmentary, elliptical, incantatory -- another indication of new directions in Bidart's work. Much of what he tries to get at in his writing is what depth psychology has called the somatic unconscious, the nonverbal, often repressed intelligence of our physical being. Many of Bidart's recent shorter poems or poem sections -- sinuous, spiralling, syntactically scrambled -- read like utterances from a faintly discernible text buried in the body: ``On such a night / at that hour when / slow bodies like automatons begin again to move down / into the earth beneath the houses in which they / live.''