The
Moon and Other Failures and
The Urban Stampede and Other Poems
Reviewed by John Drexel in
Contemporary Poetry Review
Lately I have been thinking about what constitutes, or might
constitute, popular poetry. While working on an encyclopedia of
nineteenth-century British writers, it struck me with some force
that what we, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, mean
by popular is, in most respects, quite different from what the
Victorians meant. Our terms of reference have changed since the
days of the Victorians, and what we consider to be of importance
most has changed. Despite the public clamor that greeted each new
installment of a Dickens novel, he was not so much the
Victorians' J. K. Rowling (to name, almost at random, a popular
writer whose latest work is greeted today with a similar clamor,
at least in the media and among a loyal readership base) as their
Steven Spielberg; Tennyson, not so much their Seamus Heaney or
their Billy Collins as their…well, I was about to say George
& Ira Gershwin in one, or Rodgers and Hart, but that would
raise other (unrelated) issues concerning what I think (and what
I know and don't know) about contemporary pop music; name your
favorite contemporary singer-songwriter, someone you consider an
icon of our age. In any case, the conclusion one can draw is not
that the meaning of popular has changed, so much as that the art
forms and genres that are most popular--I mean universally
popular--have altered, along with our priorities and perceptions, so
that many today might argue (and many do) that television, film,
and the compact disc have supplanted the book as the prime media
of mass culture, and that poetry is at best a marginal art, the
domain of earnest academics on the one hand and of impromptu
slammers on the other.
I touch on this subject because it also occurs to me that, in
another time--say, the time of Tennyson--F. D. Reeve might well
have been a truly popular poet, one whose star, under the right
conditions, might have shone as brightly as Tennyson's. Ask the
"average" poetry reader who he or she likes best, and if the
answer isn't the aforementioned Heaney or Collins, odds are it
might be one of any number of poets who work in a minor
confessional vein, whose verse becomes a kind of psychotherapy
intended to assuage or exploit familial anger and calm or exploit
domestic angst, whose highest ambition is to explain the poem's
I. There are, of course, different routes to this destination:
Some poets are seduced by the fascination of what's difficult,
coding their private meanings in poems that essentially serve as
cryptograms. Others--self-unacknowledged members of what in crime
and mystery fiction is called "the hum-drum school" (an
appellation that works just as well for poetry)--take the most
direct route to "accessibility" by holding steadfastly to plain
speaking, making a poetry that can seem more routine than any
piece of journalistic prose. Reeve attempts to steer a course
between these two approaches as an advocate and practitioner of
"Adequate Poetry," which, if one can go by the publisher's
publicity sheet, purports to engage "not personal malaise but
life's difficulties and challenges." Frankly, this definition
itself strikes me as inadequate; but it's something to begin with.
To put it another way, Reeve attempts to lead us back--and
possibly forward--to a poetry that appeals to a common heritage
and to common concerns beyond the poem's I and the poet's
personal preoccupations. His poems have a curious timelessness;
they seem to exist both in and outside of historical time. They
are awash in myth, in just the way that, say, Tennyson's "Ulysses"
is awash in classical myth, naturally and unselfconsciously.
Reading the poems in the two books under consideration here, I
had the sense that I had read them before--not because they are
derivative, but precisely because they tap into a common mythic
heritage. Orpheus and Euridice, Ajax and Achilles, Dido and
Aeneas, Paolo and Francesca, the heroes and heroines of
Shakespeare's magical romances, become proxies for us and our
loves: They glide through these books almost silently but not
without notice, guided by the poet's light, imaginative touch
rather than the scholar's dry precision.
Still perhaps best known as a scholar and translator of Russian
literature, Reeve gained early notice when he accompanied the
elderly Robert Frost to Russia in 1962, serving as the great
American poet's personal interpreter. The result of that
startling and improbable journey was, on Reeve's part, a minor
classic, Robert Frost in Russia, an account of that unusual
episode in Frost's life and a glimpse into the intersection of art
and politics during the cold war. (The book was reissued, with a
new introduction, by Zephyr in 2001.) Reeve is also the author of
several novels and three previous books of poems, including The
Blue Cat (FSG, 1972). Now, with his two most recent collections,
Reeve in his seventies stakes his claim not as a popular poet for
our age, perhaps, but as one who should command our attention.
Published in quick succession, The Moon and Other Failures
and The Urban Stampede and Other Poems can be read as twin halves
of a continuous whole. Each book contains two dozen or so lyric
poems which, though classically concise in their form and
expression, nonetheless are expansive in their imaginative sweep
and moral implications. The remainder of each book (more than
half of The Urban Stampede, just under half of The Moon and Other
Failures) is occupied by a longish narrative poem, about which I
shall say more in due course.
What first strikes the reader is the constancy and consistency of
the world Reeve evokes in--and invokes through--his poems. His
primary images are taken from astronomy and seafaring. Reeve's
astronomy may be derived from the modern astrophysics that has
revealed the existence of Magellanic clouds and black holes--both
directly referred to in The Moon and Other Failures--or from the
classical, mythic concept of the heavens that conceives the Moon
as involved in human fate and encompasses the Pleiades as the
seven Muses. So too the pervasive sense of time and its passage
is measured both by the movements of the stars and planets and by
the rhythms of the sea and the passage of wind-driven ships
across oceans. "Today as clouds gather and a northeaster breaks,
/ the eye of time seems suddenly at hand," he writes in "Vermont
Sonnets." And in "Coasting" he asserts that "the light that
speeds around in empty space / extracts the future from the past."
This latter poem, incidentally, not only pays homage to Tennyson
but also, in the third stanza, echoes the Yeats of "Byzantium"
and "Sailing to Byzantium": "If soul is form and gives a body
life, / reality is a gathering of ghosts," Reeve writes, and
then, "We circle the stars to find our secret play, / and the
dying mackerel believe the gong / off Permaquid tolls for them /
on the cold gray-green sea." In this poem and in others, Reeve
explores what Yeats called "the artifice of eternity."
With the geography of Reeve's poems so populous with stars,
lakes, rivers, seas, it is hardly surprising that, at its heart,
his work is a meditation on the nature of time itself. These
poems don't chronicle the passage of time as much as they return
again and again to the very notion of time, an awareness of what
is and how it contrasts with what was, the paradoxical immediacy
of memory contrasted with the strangeness of the present; the
sense that the past is more real than the present. In "Catching
Up," he declares that "at the end of the past, time now
notwithstanding, / the future threatens"; on the next page, in
"The Village Graveyard," contemplating a row of tombstones, he
notes that "Time like a kindly god / reserves some open spaces in
each row / for the living dead." Without ascribing any
theological similarities to the two poets, it does not take much
of a leap to see an affinity with the Eliot of "Burnt Norton,"
for whom "Time present and time future / What might have been and
what has been / Point to one end, which is always present."
Their strong, repeated images, and their awareness of time
passing give Reeve's verse its quietly haunting quality. Equally
notable, however, is these poems' formal structure, the pattern
of regular stanzas within each poem, whether constructed of
three, four, five, or six lines. He works within these forms with
a sense of ease, never seeming hemmed-in by the stanza form he
has chosen or that has chosen him. (This is quite evident, for
instance, in the "The Moon and Other Failures" and in "The Old
World.") In those poems in which he rhymes, his rhymes almost
always are simple; he eschews the verbal pyrotechnics that
preoccupy many younger and more aggressive poets. Likewise, his
poems' titles often are deceptively flat and unassertive, almost
conventional and generic: "Voices," "Twilight," and "Vermont
Sonnets" (in The Moon and Other Failures), "Still Life," "April"
(in The Urban Stampede)--titles that give little indication of
the substance and force of poems they shyly announce. (To what
extent this might be a conscious, artful decision is a subject
for consideration elsewhere. Should a poem's title be as direct
and literal as possible or, rather, through being fanciful, in
the way of an Ashbery title, say, seemingly have little to do
with the poem's apparent subject but lead us only through
indirection?)
In The Urban Stampede, the poem "The Old World," which begins,
"When I was young the earth was a hard blue globe / with
multi-colored countries and British pinks," brings to mind
Bishop's question "Are they assigned, or can the countries pick
their colors?" in "The Map." But although Reeve's poem might be
read as a counterpart to Bishop's, the cartography he studies is
that of time rather than of place, as is evident the final
stanza: Now my long-lived hours recombine the past.
All time is fiction: in the seas men drown.
How can I prove my grandfather existed,
or there's a library where this world will last?
This poem functions too as a twin to the title poem of The Moon
and Other Failures, which begins
The stones of Paris smell of books
from bibles lighting up the Middle Ages
to romantic tales of unrequited love.
Every Sunday my grandfather winds his clocks
and checks the past for any uncut pages.
But I must emphasize that these are not generic "grandfather"
poems. Rather, they are, again, meditations on the nature of
memory. Although memory is not quite sufficient, and not
reliable, it is the necessary element that makes us
human--enabling us, almost, to make sense of what happens in our
lives. Much is lost in time, Reeve says again and again; but
without memory, we ourselves are lost.
The two long poems that are the centerpieces of The Moon and The
Urban Stampede stand in contrast to the compact lyrics I have
been discussing. They are conceived (and have been performed) as
chamber oratorios. The subject of each is drawn from classical
myth, with a Greek Chorus commenting on the action.
As it does elsewhere in The Moon and Other Failures, the sea
figures prominently too--as presiding image, symbol, and
character--in Alcyone, Reeve's adaptation of the eleventh book of
Ovid's Metamorphoses, which takes up more than half of this book.
He calls his version “a modern oratorio for songs, musicians
and narrator."
For many modern readers, the myth of Alcyone and Ceyx may be even
more distant and unfamiliar than the legend of Lemminkäinen
in Tuonela. In Reeve's retelling, it is set aboard "a fishing
vessel fraught with human passion." Here, Hylas's rape of Alcyone
has more than a touch of lurid melodrama. As Hylas advances upon
his sister in law, we find ourselves not in the world of Homer's
rosy-fingered dawn but in a bodice ripper's purple-prosy pages. Hylas
is the archetypical brute villain. He does not leer, but he
literally "lours": "His eyes attack in hungry anger, / his hands
crawl crab-like through salt air, / while, like a shark's, his
body twists / and whips behind his barred white teeth." And,
"Gathering himself to mount, / he drives closer, harder, madder,
seizes / her wrists with his rough, reddened hands…" Surely more
than one writer of a Harlequin romance must have used the line
"His manliness / towered in its triumph," as Reeve does here.
Because of its more wistful tone, and because of the more evident
universality of its subject--a reworking of the more familiar
myth of Orpheus and Euridice--to my mind the "The Urban Stampede"
is a less problematic, more consistently satisfying and
compelling poem. In place of the classical Underworld, Reeve sets the
myth in a London pub called the Urban Stampede. His Orpheus is
Mack, "a handsome young man, a great singer and guitarist" who
goes to the Urban Stampede to search for his wife, Mary May, who
earlier had become "seriously deranged from illness" and had
disappeared, turning up at the bar "Lost and lonely…unaware that
the illness has made her deaf."
Setting the scene, Reeve allows the Chorus to indulge in a bit of
Muldoonery as it intones:
Here in the Urban Stampede
we've got everything you need
for a perfect evening out:
If you ain't got much money
you can still treat your honey
to a glass of Lauderdale stout
or recite her some Hamlet
while we fry you an omelette
and figure the charges out.
Granted, the rhyme and meter and diction here are more James
Simmons than Paul Muldoon, but they are appropriate to the
atmosphere Reeve wants to create. And there is more to this poem
than jokiness, more than the alcohol-fuelled chatter of
late-night sessions at the pub, as when Mary May sings
The wind from the West blows warm
across meadowsweet, briar rose
and the osprey circling the cove
where white boats come and go.
Narration and commentary is provided by the Born Observer, who
declares that "the music made / their story into living song," and by
the Chorus, which endorses this view, shouting, "Three cheers for
music, the key to mysteries!"
As in the original myth, however, the lovers cannot be reunited:
"In the confusion as the swinging doors swung wide / Mack lost
her hand and quickly called her name." But "She, not hearing,
made no move but waited / where she was for his next step ahead;
/ and he, forgetting where she was and why, turned to check." And
that, of course, is the fatal moment. Mary May is swallowed up in
the chaos of the Urban Stampede, and Mack can only mourn his
irrevocable loss, finding consolation in the thought that "Surely
she dreams of the sounds of music / as green leaves assert the
life of a tree. Wherever she is she must be in heavenly light."
I would be remiss if, in closing, I didn't return to the shorter
poems and single out "The Grand Illusion" (in The Urban
Stampede), which in my personal mental anthology of painting
poems is likely to rank alongside Auden's "Musée des Beaux
Arts" and Derek Mahon's "Courtyards in Delft." The painting is
Caravaggio's The Supper at Emmaus; the final of the six stanzas
reads:
The bird is untouched; the broken bread is blessed
but uneaten. The waiter's doubt throws the three together.
So masterful is the perspective that you can't guess
what's really there-a cloth-covered table, food,
and figures? or a holy traveller's weather?
or, love found, long loss at last made good?
Here the visual becomes verbal and, in the process,
spiritual.
In his late poetic flowering, Reeve has unearthed a gift that
allows him to be bookish and literary, and unapologetically
so--and yet write in a voice that manages to sound entirely
uncontrived and unselfconscious. Like Yeats, he recognizes that
poems are pure artifice but must not seem artificial. He writes a
poetry that allows us to romanticize the moon and that yet just
as surely acknowledges that stars die, and worlds--and we--die
with them. At once timely and timeless, these are two books not
to be judged by their unprepossessing covers.