[David Rosenthal]

I have been waffling on the whole collected/selected vs. individual volume issue. I get the argument for the individual slim volume, and I am a fan of a well put together volume. But, when I go back to my offending entries -- the Robinson Complete, the Hugo collected, and the Haiku Anthology -- I have trouble making the switch.

The trouble comes from a personal and emotional connection to the books, and I think that is what the thread was calling for. I came to Hugo, for example, through this collected. And though it is long, I read through it like a novel. There were "chapters" -- individual volumes -- that were marvelous, and could easily be entered on this list, but the whole book was what "wowed" me. The Haiku Anthology is even easier for me to defend -- it was a revelation to me as a reader and would be haiku poet, and there is no alternative to it.

Robinson is more complicated. I came to Robinson through selecteds and collecteds before I knew what his individual book were. My impulse to pick "Children of the Night" was because of its "importance" more than any personal experience with it, which I think is one of the worries about picking selecteds and collecteds. But it is the poems from that volume and several others, plus the later long works -- some of which Nemo mentioned -- that cumulatively hooked me. The Complete Poems holds them all.

So, I am sticking with what I entered.

David R.

[Duncan Gillies MacLaurin]

Douglas Dunn's talent for elegy was announced in his first collection, Terry Street (1969), in what has since become one of his most famous poems:

A Removal from Terry Street

On a squeaking cart, they push the usual stuff,
A mattress, bed ends, cups, carpets, chairs,
Four paperback westerns. Two whistling youths
In surplus U S Army battle-jackets
Remove their sister’s goods. Her husband
Follows, carrying on his shoulders the son
Whose mischief we are glad to see removed,
And pushing, of all things, a lawnmower.
There is no grass in Terry Street. The worms
Come up cracks in concrete yards in moonlight.
That man, I wish him well. I wish him grass.

First published in 1985, Elegies is a collection of 39 poems that express Dunn's love for, and grief at the premature death of, his wife Lesley, an artist, who died in 1981 and to whom the book is dedicated.

It might seem to someone who has not read the collection but who knows something about its genesis that Elegies would be a somewhat depressing read. But that is simply not the case. Not surprisingly, some of the poems are melancholic, even sad. But the whole collection is uplifting and very, very moving.

This is the first poem in the collection, apparently written before any inkling of impending doom:


Re-reading Katherine Mansfield's Bliss and Other Stories

A pressed fly, like a skeleton of gauze,
Has waited here between page 98
And 99, in the story called "Bliss",
Since the summer of '62, its date,

Its last day in a trap of pages. Prose
Fly, what can "Je ne parle pas francais" mean
To you who died in Scotland, when I closed
These two sweet pages you were crushed between?

Here is a green bus ticket for a week
In May, my place mark in "The Dill Pickle".
I did not come home that Friday. I flick
Through all our years, my love, and I love you still.

These stories must have been inside my head
That day, falling in love, preparing this
Good life; and this, this fly, verbosely buried
In "Bliss", one dry tear punctuating "Bliss".


Here's a later one:

The Kaleidoscope

To climb these stairs again, bearing a tray,
Might be to find you pillowed with your books,
Your inventories listing gowns and frocks
As if preparing for a holiday.
Or, turning from the landing, I might find
My presence watched through your kaleidoscope,
A symmetry of husbands, each redesigned
In lovely forms of foresight, prayer and hope.
I climb these stairs a dozen times a day
And, by the open door, wait, looking in
At where you died. My hands become a tray
Offering me, my flesh, my soul, my skin.
Grief wrongs us so. I stand, and wait, and cry
For the absurd forgiveness, not knowing why.

There are eight formal sonnets in this collection. Dunn has only written a handful of sonnets since, and a couple of these are hark-backs to the theme of Elegies.

The collection won The Whitbread Book of the Year.

Ian Gregson's assessment of Elegies (in "There are many worlds': The 'Dialogic' in Terry Street and After", from Reading Douglas Dunn Edited by Robert Crawford & David Kinloch, Edinburgh 1992)
is worth quoting in full:

"In the case of love and death - the central themes of Elegies - the relationship between self and other is obviously paramount, and this collection is so powerful because of the way love and death are constantly reassessed by the movement from the poet's perspective to that of the dying wife and back, and into that of friends and even casual bystanders. There was a precedent for this in poems like 'The Haunter' by the profoundly novelised poet Thomas Hardy, but the poems in Elegies are more open-ended than Hardy's; there is much more suggestion in Dunn's poems that the single perspective is vulnerable, open to question. 'There are many worlds', and that of the dying is only one of them and mingles frighteningly, grotesquely but also matter-of-factly with that of the living. Such mingling of worlds produces both mutual bafflement and potential enrichment; it is edgy but fraught with imaginative possibilities."

[R. Nemo Hill]

I very much agree about the Collected Robinson, David. His later work is much neglected, and in the Collected Poems it is clear how vital it is to the arc of his work as a whole: its oft criticized repetitiveness, those endless permutations of theme & dynamic come to seem more of an increasing refinement of insights into a very basic obsessive human condition...then at the end, with the startling Amaranth, he bursts out of the mold before coasting to a halt in King Jasper. The Collected also contextualizes the mythic Arthurian books well, first humanizing myth, and then, with the more contemporary pieces emerging out of them, quietly mythologizing the human & the mundane. The patient rigor behind his willingness to go on and on at such length (I think most of those final poems had their own year of work devoted to them, at MacDowell) is inspiring to me--and the reasons for it would not be apparent without the fullness of that volume. It inspired a patience in reading as well: I devoted most of a year to reading the book cover to cover, and heard no clock ticking over my shoulder.

Nemo

[Gregory Dowling]

That's a fascinating light you throw on Robinson, Nemo. I confess I've never tackled the long later poems and now you've convinced me that I must.

[R. Nemo Hill]

Read them all together!

Nemo

[Patrick Foley]

I'm glad to see more about Dunn from you, Duncan. When I was in my local used bookstore recently, I found a copy of his selected put out by Faber. I wouldn't have known a thing about him but for the wonderful poem you put up in the appreciation thread. Thanks for leading me to him.

Pat

[Cally Conan-Davies]

Only in Wallace Stevens is it possible to find such sustained and elegant meditations on death. During my teaching years, I read 'The Ship Of Death' aloud to people ranging in age 18 to 98, and each time was rewarded and renewed by the look on each face.

'Birds, Beasts and Flowers' is another glorious book which I might have selected here but for the fact that 'The Ship Of Death' is one of the truly great 20th century poems. Lawrence's Collected Poems is, for me, an essential volume.

And because I am so well-used to the disdain Lawrence inspires, having been spat on both literally and figuratively for his sake many times, and because my deep regard for Lawrence has changed my life in many ways at many times (see my poem 'Thirroul' published in The Hudson Review this year), I offer this much-loved poem by another poet who could easily get a look-in here, Tony Hoagland, instead of one from Lawrence's Last Poems.

I wish I had written this poem.


Lawrence

On two occasions in the past twelve months
I have failed, when someone at a party
spoke of him with a dismissive scorn,
to stand up for D. H. Lawrence,

a man who burned like an acetylene torch
from one end to the other of his life.
These individuals, whose relationship to literature
is approximately that of a tree shredder

to stands of old-growth forest,
these people leaned back in their chairs,
bellies full of dry white wine and the ovum of some foreign fish,
and casually dropped his name

the way pygmies with their little poison spears
strut around the carcass of a fallen elephant.
“O Elephant,” they say,
“you are not so big and brave today!”

It’s a bad day when people speak of their superiors
with a contempt they haven’t earned,
and it’s a sorry thing when certain other people

don’t defend the great dead ones
who have opened up the world before them.
And though, in the catalogue of my betrayals,
this is a fairly minor entry,

I resolve, if the occasion should recur,
to uncheck my tongue and say, “I love the spectacle
of maggots condescending to a corpse,”
or, “You should be so lucky in your brainy, bloodless life

as to deserve to lift
just one of D. H. Lawrence’s urine samples
to your arid psychobiographic
theory-tainted lips.”

Or maybe I’ll just take the shortcut
between the spirit and the flesh,
and punch someone in the face,
because human beings haven’t come that far

in their effort to subdue the body,
and we still walk around like zombies
in our dying, burning world,
able to do little more

than fight, and fuck, and crow,
something Lawrence wrote about
in such a manner
as to make us seem magnificent.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Yo Kali!
I don't know this Hoagland fellow but in honor of such a fiery and exciting poem I shall move Lawrence up to the top of my learning pile.

[Cally Conan-Davies]

Gyps?!

Yo Ho Ho is coming - ask for the D. H. L. Collected Poems for Christmas! I PhD'd on him. Read, and if you want to, we can talk. I have words to say!

As for Hoagland, try THIS ONE. I love it.

P.Ssst - If the 'rant' poem isn't a genre, it should be! Let's Rant!!!

[David Rosenthal]

Cally,

Despite my abiding respect for you, I am not a fan of Lawrence. But I do like Hoagland. I think his best work is post-20th Century, though, so maybe he's not right for this list. (Andrew, try this one.)

But since this list is an inspiration, and it is you, I might give DHL another try.

David R.