The Eyes Have It

Abstract

The Eyes Have It Sam Pickering (bio) Lynn Z. Bloom, The Seven Deadly Virtues and Other Lively Essays: Coming of Age as a Writer, Teacher, Risk Taker. University of South Carolina Press, 2008. xii + 212 pages. Illustrated. $29.95; Philip Brady, By Heart: Reflections of a Rust Belt Bard. University of Tennessee Press, 2008. x + 164 pages. $29.95; Jeffrey Hammond, Small Comforts: Essays at Middle Age. Kent State University Press, 2008. x + 170 pages. $18.95 pb; James Everett Kibler, Memory’s Keep. Pelican Publishing, 2006. 217 pages. Illustrated. $22; William Kloefkorn, Breathing in the Fullness of Time. University of Nebraska Press, 2009. 244 pages. $22.95; Stephen Miller, The Peculiar Life of Sundays. Harvard University Press, 2008. 310 pages. $27.95; Adrienne Rich, A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, 1996–2008. Norton, 2009. x + 174 pages. $24.95; Kathleen Rooney, Live Nude Girl: my life as an object. University of Arkansas Press, 2008. x + 184 pages. $22.50. “The eye has become a human eye,” Karl Marx wrote, and Adrienne Rich repeats, “only when its object has become a human, social object.” Yesterday I rescued a snapping turtle from the center of the Mansfield City Road, freeing it in Barrow’s Pond. Wild indigo duskywings appeared on the sandy road running through the Ogushwitz Meadow. A hog-nosed snake flared its neck and then swiveled away from me near a stand of old field birch. Lilacs are browning and losing their fragrance, but when I roam the yard the scrubbed minty aroma of gill rises from the ground. At dusk thrushes call, their songs like the clothes of Herrick’s Julia flowing in sweet liquefaction. Through a miscellany of articles, reviews, and talks in A Human Eye, Rich examines “poetry, as it moves through human lives.” The book includes chapters on Iraqi poetry, Muriel Rukeyser, James Scully, and “Three Classics for New Readers: Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Che Guevara,” among others. She urges readers to become active in the hard causes of helping others and changing political systems and platitudes. The book made me feel guilty and self-indulgent. Yet life is broader and greener than Rich makes out. In The Lover’s Guide to Trapping Wyatt Prunty describes the mole “sleeved by soft earth” and a combine “swallowing a path across the field.” Maybe, just maybe, such things soften the hardened calluses that living raises above the heart more effectively than political writing. I admire Rich’s description of her father’s wonderful library. She quotes well—the Israeli novelist Shulamith Hareven, for example, explaining that she is a Levantine, not an ideologue: “Because I am a Levantine, all fundamentalists on all sides, from Khomeini to Kahane, will always want to destroy me and all Levantines like me, here and in the neighboring countries.” “In America,” James Baldwin writes, “life seems to move faster than anywhere else on the globe and each generation is promised more than it will get; which [End Page 136] creates, in each generation, a furious, bewildered rage, the rage of people who cannot find solid ground beneath their feet.” Rich turns phrases tellingly—“ the prison-industrial complex,” for instance. Yet, amid her concern for humanity, is an element of the inhumane. “The serious revolutionary,” she writes, “like the serious artist, can’t afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.” Strip away delusion and self-deception, and living becomes almost impossible. Tear away ignorance and sentimentality to replace them with metallic knowledge, and thorny dislike and prejudice will soon thrive. In The Peculiar Life of Sundays Stephen Miller draws most of his examples from literature. Typical chapters are titled “Varieties of Sunday Observance: Boswell and His Contemporaries”; “Four American Writers and Sunday: Edwards, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman”; and “Sunday Nostalgia, Sunday Despair: Wallace Stevens and Robert Lowell.” In the book appears a good discussion of Sabbatarianism, its advocates not being the sort of people who would tolerate the Levantine. Contemporary Connecticut is misnamed: instead of “The Nutmeg State,” it should be called “The Agnostic State.” It wasn’t always so. In 1781 Samuel Peters listed the state’s Sabbatarian laws: “No one shall run on the Sabbath-day, or walk...