The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall: Poems at the Extremes of Feeling ed. by Robert Pinsky

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall: Poems at the Extremes of Feeling ed. by Robert Pinsky Paul Schwaber (bio) The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall: Poems at the Extremes of Feeling, edited by Robert Pinsky. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019, 215 pages. This adventurous and challenging anthology, compiled by three-time United States Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, presents fascinating moments of psychological intensity expressed in accomplished poetry. Such diverse emotions as love, grief, rage, guilt, shame, and manic laughter, as well as struggles of passion and reason, sanity and irrationality, extreme imagination, and humor and fright are presented—and through the power of language made shareable. Each pronounced psychological state is explored by poems that range in time from long ago to contemporaneity—from Fulke-Greville, Sappho, and Dante, for example, to current writers—and thereby manage to involve rhythmic, tonal, stylistic, and even socio-historical changes, too. Yet an insistent recognition offered to the reader, other than the delight and invitation to understand and experience absorbing poetry, is the ranging complication and wonder of the human mind—made possible, of course, by expressive language as well as by notably persistent continuities of humanity through time. Deriving the book’s title from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Mr. Pinsky keeps “cliffs of fall” in sight while exploring the shapes and kinds of extreme feelings in these intriguing poems. Thereby, he also introduces a reader to a good number of talented current poets. I, at least, did not know the work of many of them and am grateful for the opportunity to learn of and appreciate their work. Not that I understood every poem— but the mind, we know, is adept at meanings and mysteries, and the range of aesthetic, uniquely experienced moments offered here is impressive. Most of the poems are briefly and perceptively introduced by Mr. Pinsky; others, also perceptively, by his associate, Laura Marris. Certain poems, of course, have long proved memorable, and lines linger; from Walt Whitman’s elegy for Abraham Lincoln, for example: [End Page 419] Yet each I keep, and all—retrievements out of the night; The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird, And the tallying chant, the echo arous’d to my soul, With the lustrous and drooping star, with the countenance full of woe, With the lilac tall, and its blossoms of mastering odor; With the holders holding my hand, nearing the call of the bird, Comrades mine, and in the midst, and their memory ever I keep—for the dead I loved so well; For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands [. . .]and this For his dear sake; Lilac and star and bird, twined with the chant of the soul, There in the fragrant pines, and the cedars dusk and dim. (p. 52) Perhaps less known, but surely also deserving of fame, is this sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay: I, being born a woman and distressedBy all the needs and notions of my kindAm urged by your propinquity to findYour person fair, and feel a certain zestTo bear your body’s weight upon my breast:So subtly is the fume of life designed,To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,And leave me once again undone, possessed.Think not for this, however, the poor treasonOf my stout blood against my staggering brain,I shall remember you with love, or seasonMy scorn with pity—let me make it plain.I find this frenzy insufficient reasonFor conversation when we meet again. (p. 95) Coming forward in time, an all-too convincing poem of self-censure by Heather McHugh, easily entrapped me: [End Page 420] Not to Be Dwelled On Self-interest cropped up even there,the day I hoisted three, insteadof the ceremonially called for two,spadefuls of loam on topof the coffin of my friend. Why shovel more than anybody else?What did I think I’d prove? More love(mud in her eye)? More will to work?(Her father what, a shirker?) Christ,what wouldn’t anybody giveto get that gesture back? She cannot die again; and Ido...