Images of Light, Landscapes of the Mind

A new edition of Light and Dark provides the occasion to confirm what ought to be well known: that William Bronk, in his first book (1956) had already achieved "a composition well... proposed"; so well proposed that "what is stated" there "is clearly what there is" "incantations" that "conjure the form of the world...." Not that the world can be "ever finally known except/as some response..." "by this and this," as he says. The particulars comprising Light and Dark - "The Mind's Landscape on an Early Winter Day," for example, or "The Rain of Small Occurrences," Vase of Various Flowers," "The Red at Sherman's Farm," "At Tikal" - remain durably "what there is."

Between that first volume and Silence andMetaphor, four other books of poems and the extraordinary essays of The New World have extended these particulars in more than one direction, a moving space constantly pushing outward, here, then there, then there, which becomes at all because it moves, because it holds itself to certain lines.

One analogy for such poems, if only in terms of the "serious business" they undertake, might be with the "ideas of order" of Wallace Stevens. Nothing. seems miscellaneous or beside the point. The particulars of To Praise the Music (1972) and Silence and Metaphor, however spare and abstracted, derive much of their power from the ways in which the "sonnets" of the former and the "octaves" of the latter hold themselves to their "certain lines" with rectitude and flexibility.

There is, in this latest book, "the silence" to begin with, which "is everywhere," and "Because it has always been, there is no time"

No need, then, to wait for the time: it comes always in the sense it was always here.

Noise is here but never any sound. We listen for sound; it is as if we were deaf.

Under the noise, silence is what we hear: final, always, wherever. Silence is all.

Or it is all, except for what goes, is "gone," what "I thought to keep": "Grass, . . . and you, trees, water, gone too." - breaking the mold of the octave for once, and requiring two more lines.

As for "metaphor," it is what "Everything is, almost in the utterance," although its terms and context may not be so easy to grasp:

There are no near galaxies: this as far as any, if not in terms of miles we know how meaningless miles are in terms of miles. How far from me to you?

Everything is, almost in the utterance, metaphor — as we measure miles, and miles are meaningless, but we know what distance is:

Unmeasurable. But there are distances.

Mot in the usual sense a sequence or a set of variatiohs on a theme, these new poems inform each other; they acquire a density of meaning - of meanings - as they accumulate. And they take perhaps, more than a little getting used to.

From the beginning, Philip Booth's poetry has been possessed by and possessive of place He has said, "I have Maine in mind and at heart all year; when I can't be home, I write mv way back." Maine is, for him, "the purest kind of metaphor... a way of surviving hard country." In this respect, although it ventures as far afield as the wilderness of TV, Peru, and "A Dream of Russia," Available Light is characteristic. The first poem, "Entry," concludes:

... Given this day, none better, I try these words to quicken the silence: I break track across it to make myself known.

And in "Opening Up," "We're here: we've come the long way back."

Such recognitions are sometimes won at considerable cost. A self-criticism may become ambiguous or inadvertent self-justification:

I'm Puritan to the bone, down to the marrow and then some: if I'm not sorry I worry, if I can't worry I count.

But what has been so long remembered as to seem to have composed itself— the boyhood experience recorded in "Stove" for example offers a respite from the tensions delineated in "Panic" or in "Ways" and "Word," both of which identify death with the outrage and violence of our time. "Ways," incidentally, makes use of those fragmentary notations W. H. Auden handled so knowingly in his last books; and, indeed, Booth is something of a virtuoso in adapting to his own ends and his own voice the conventions of the contemporaries he most admires.

His title comes from Paul Strand; and the poem "Photographer" concludes with a statement intended, one assumes, to apply to the poet as well: "I keep for life / how light / shapes how / lives deepen." This is an ambitious undertaking, and some readers may find Booth best served by. those poems characterized in a few lines which precede that conclusion: "I hunt far in, as deep as / light moves; where light steeps / in the long momentum."

SILENCE AND METAPHORLIGHT AND DARKBy William Bronk '38Elizabeth Press, 1975. 58, 32 pp.Boards, $16; $8, wrappers, each.

A VAILABLE LIGHTBy Philip Booth '47Viking, 1976. 84 pp. $5.95.

Poet, critic, and professor of English at Northeastern University, Mr. Morse expects his newbook of poems, The Sequences, to be publishedwithin the year.