Perhaps this belongs more in "Discerning Eye"--but I am curious to know what people who have read <u>Shells</u>, Craig Arnold's Yale Younger winning volume (controversial, partly because Merwin chose no manuscript the year before; this was his debut as judge), think of it. I am also curious why poets like Arnold don't seem to get lumped in with other formalists--is it a matter of not publishing in formal journals? For he is definitely a formalist of sorts--whether neo, retro, what have you.
I find some of the book quite strong (and I admit to coming to it with something of a bias), but perhaps some of the longer things in prosy, slant-rimed-couplets seem to be padding it out. I think all of the poems are in the first person, which strikes me as a limitation (of course, then, there are plenty of great poets who held to that approach--Emily Dickinson, I believe, for one).
There is also some posturing--a hipper-than-thou-I'm-in-a-band kind of attitude. The book also feels a bit as though it was written to win an award--the "shells" metaphor throughout is almost too tidy.
Some of the poems, though, seem to me rather fine, very contemporary, energetic as well as elegant. Well, I'll post a small assortment, and see what folks think.
The poems tend to look freer on the page than they actually are. "Artichoke" is a double sonnet:
Artichoke
Baffling flower, barely edible,
camouflaged in a GI's olive drab
--out loud you wonder Whos's it trying to fool?
It is a nymph that some god tries to grap
and have his way with, I explain. She scorns
his lust, and when he sees he's met his match,
he turns her into a flower, covered with thorns,
to keep her other lovers out of reach.
You say You made that up. You say That's sick.
You say The things men think of are so cruel.
Under the bamboo steamer there's a slick
of emerald-green water. I watch you pull
the petals off, each with a warm knot
of paler flesh left hanging at the root.
A "loves me, loves me not" sort of endeavor,
I say, but you don't laugh. It hasn't been
so long since like me for being clever
stopped being enough for you. Sly pangolin,
endearingly nearsighted, belly rolled
up in a spiky ball--that's how I keep
my wits about me. I notice how you've polled
the petal-points an inch, how you scrape
each leaf with your incisors, the two
small grooves they leave. It makes me sick to watch.
You're awfully quiet today. What's wrong with you?
I want to tell you what . . . but there's a catch,
deep in my throat, that stops me, makes me choke
the words back, crack another pointless joke.
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