Plundered Hearts: New and Selected Poems by J. D. McClatchy (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Plundered Hearts: New and Selected Poems by J. D. McClatchy Richie Hofmann (bio) J. D. McClatchy, Plundered Hearts: New and Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 288 pp. J. D. McClatchy’s Plundered Hearts shows the poet as the librettist of his own life. His poems recast autobiographical details to the level of opera, everyday narrative into verse, speech into an exacting and glittering music. Throughout his career, McClatchy’s poems have explored and exhibited musicality. Plundered Hearts is an anthology of these formal experiments. Complex structures abound, intricate gemlike stanza shapes, rhymes. But the forms of McClatchy’s poems, both the new and the selected earlier works, act as more than high-gloss veneers for polished [End Page 419] thoughts and feelings. They add further tension to some of McClatchy’s abiding creative interests: merging the high with the low, the sacred with the profane, the living body in all its grotesqueness and hunger with the seemingly timeless demands of art. In one new poem, McClatchy rhymes “palatial” with “stem-cell facial.” In another new poem, “Bacon’s Easel,” he describes the precarious situation of figures in a painting: The one, his head wrenched to the side,His scrotum like a cortex but hairy,His penis eerily catenary,Seems to know the other has lied. The language of geometry and the language of sex converge in the poet’s analysis of Bacon’s art, both astute and visceral. In McClatchy’s imagination, as in his world, these dual registers coexist, and they complicate each other. As Hazmat, the title of one of McClatchy’s most daring and remarkable books, suggests, there are hazardous materials here (failed relationships, bad sex, terrorism, grief), but he handles them and treats them dazzlingly. Plundered Hearts, McClatchy’s first new and selected collection of poems, offers twenty-nine pages of new material, and a selection of poems from his previous six collections. These range from a very small sample of poems from his first three books, Scenes from Another Life (1981), Stars Principal (1986), and The Rest of the Way (1990), to more generous groupings of his three most recent efforts, Ten Commandments (1998), Hazmat (2002), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Mercury Dressing (2009). McClatchy’s creative output is impressive. In addition to these six collections of poems, he has authored three books of essays, edited more than twenty books, translated libretti into English for operas by Mozart, Bizet, and others, and penned original libretti for more than a dozen new operas, as well—all of this while teaching in the English Department at Yale University and editing The Yale Review. It’s not surprising that the selected poems of an editor as esteemed as McClatchy would be so carefully curated, so trimmed and shaped as a collection as they are in Plundered Hearts. Nor is it surprising that McClatchy would play host to a range of other artists within these poems. Auden, Bishop, Merrill, and Hecht are tutelary spirits here, to name just a few of the poets he invokes. Naturally, the worlds of music and opera saturate the collection, from the early admission in “My Old Idols” of the speaker’s diva worship of Maria Callas to “Sorrow in 1944,” McClatchy’s fascinating treatment of the characters in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, now in a wartime United States troubled by anti-Japanese policies and prejudices. Some of the best new poems here are McClatchy’s very fine translations of “Two Arias from The Marriage of Figaro” and “Three Poems by [End Page 420] Wilhelm Müller,” the nineteenth-century German poet known primarily today for Schubert’s musical settings of his work. The Müller translations in Plundered Hearts include three of the twenty-four poems in Schubert’s famous Winterreise cycle, a group of art songs for voice and piano, about a man’s winter journey through doubt, loneliness, failed love, and desire for death. The translator has chosen his selections wisely, here showcasing three of the most dramatic and memorable lyrics from the cycle, including “The Hurdy-Gurdy Man,” its weird and terrifying conclusion. In the almost comically macabre “The Gray Head,” the young speaker momentarily...