POETRY IN REVIEW

Abstract

1 8 0 Y P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W S T E P H E N Y E N S E R Some contrivances can be light, tentative, airy, and immediate enough that they hardly seem contrivances. Think not of Joseph Cornell’s boxes themselves but of those boxes as rendered by Octavio Paz’s ‘‘Objetos y Apariciones’’ – or indeed by Elizabeth Bishop in her wizard translation of Paz’s eulogy. Consider the last stanzas, their ‘‘monuments to every moment’’: A comb is a harp strummed by the glance of a little girl born dumb. The reflector of the inner eye scatters the spectacle: God all alone above an extinct world. The apparitions are manifest, their bodies weigh less than light, lasting as long as this phrase lasts. Fa r - Fe t c h e d , by Devin Johnston (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 77 pages, $23.00) 1 8 1 R Joseph Cornell: inside your boxes my words become visible for a moment. Much of the e√ect is sonic: comb – strummed – dumb; or sonic and semantic at once: manifest – less – light – lasting – long – lasts. And much of it is the work simply of connotation: glance – inner eye – spectacle – light – visible. These lines might seem as much the product of whim and accident as of purpose and intent. And maybe they are. The kind of verse I have in mind gives the illusion of accommodating accidents and hints, guesses, innuendoes and echoes, hints and intimations. Its implications call their own existence into doubt, they are so subtly present. If they were material, its stanzas might be gossamer and bits of lichen, thread, and thistledown stuck together with hummingbird spittle. The bougainvillea bract that seems a dwarf moth suspended in still air and turning as on angels’ breaths hangs from such a wisp of web as might be used in these ghosts of nests. Words can make such things, perhaps. Mallarmé thought so. Others besides Mallarmé and Bishop have given us examples: Wallace Stevens in certain moods, James Merrill in his symbolist mode, Ezra Pound here and there, and Pound’s protégé Basil Bunting – and others back at least as far as the troubadours, writers of trobar clus and trobar ric (‘‘closed’’ and ‘‘rich’’ poetry), verses so oblique and recherché that their readers had to be connoisseurs. Devin Johnston composes poems in that tradition – or that vein. Not always, but often enough to be identified as a descendant of William of Aquitaine, the Troubadour, and none of Johnston’s work is untouched by the mode. In fact, his ‘‘New Song,’’ one of the poems in Far-Fetched, his fourth slim volume of verse, derives from William’s poem beginning ‘‘Ab la douzor del temps novel,’’ and while his version is not as arcane as some troubadour verse, its opening stanza insinuates a relationship: As sweetness flows through these new days the woods leaf out, and songbirds phrase in neumes of roosted melody incipits to a new song. That love should find lubricity and quicken, having slept so long. 1 8 2 Y E N S E R Y Johnston’s logophilia, evident here in ‘‘neumes’’ and ‘‘incipits’’ and the etymology of ‘‘lubricity’’ (which looks back to ‘‘flows’’ in the first line), comports with trobar ric and to some degree undercuts with a nice irony the poem’s concluding stanza: I hate the elevated talk that disregards both root and stalk and sets insipid pride above vicissitudes of love and strife. Let others claim a higher love: we’ve got the bread, we’ve got the knife. At the same time that he disavows ‘‘elevated talk,’’ his sly reference back to the ‘‘root’’ of ‘‘lubricity’’ and his witty echo of ‘‘incipits’’ in ‘‘insipid’’ and ‘‘vicissitudes’’ prove his fondness for heightened speech and refined style, as does the paradox itself. This ‘‘New Song’’ is in more than one sense an old song. So it is that we get a rendition of Horace (‘‘Sailing under Storm’’ is a seductively homespun translation of Odes, I.14, ‘‘O navis, referent in mare’’), and ‘‘Two from Catullus’’ (one stems from number 7, ‘‘Quaeris, quot...