I think Seth's is one of the best. I do admire certain structural elements in Merwin's book, though as poetry I think it pretty bland in many places (I gave it perhaps too positive a review in Hudson when it came out). Merwin is such a graceful prose writer and such skill influences his handling of the "verse novel." Having said that, it does seem to me that the verse novel, as opposed to the epic or other narrative genres, is itself a peculiar, hybrid beast, and probably requires some of the prose novelist's sense of structure and character to succeed, a set of skills many poets just don't possess. I think Brad Leithuaser's Darlington's Fall is a very, very good novel about a man with a real intellectual life, and I think Leithuaser finds a pretty good balance between the demands of verse (handled rather more loosely here than in his shorter poems) and the necessities of story. Mark Jarman's Iris is damn good too, if you find the Jeffers line to your taste. There's a peculiar sense in which he might not have found the right balance between story and lyricism to pull off the ending, but I'm not sure whether that's a matter of taste or not. Robert McDowell's The Diviners begins splendidly, but falters badly, I think, as he tries to resolve the story.
Well, in a world where reading itself is in sharp decline and imaginative literature is being marginalized virtually everywhere (as demonstrated by the recent NEA report), I don't see why not try something audacious like a verse novel. I don't know yet what the fate of mine will be, but I thought I'd raise the issue, anyway.
I'm very glad to see Christina Rossetti's work mentioned above, by the way, and of course narrative poems had a real popularity in the 19th Century.
I have yet to come to terms with book-length poems by Glyn Maxwell and Les Murray. I do know very well Derek Walcott's postmodern epic Omeros, and think it has great things in it, but I'm disappointed that he did not do what a good novelist would do and honor his story and characters over his conceptual frame. It's as if he sold his story out to the postcolonial critics of academe. Still, what brilliant things there are in that book. It's not a novel, though, so much as a troubled epic.
More later.
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