POETRY

Editor’s Note: The following reviews represent the best books of 1997 in the judgment of our contributors. Their original reviews have been edited and condensed for reasons of space.

JOHN HOLLANDER

WALLACE STEVENS: Collected Poetry and Prose. By Wallace Stevens . Library of America: 1034 pp., $35

The Library of America has brought out, fittingly within a few years of a similar volume of Frost, a canonical collection of Stevens’ poetry and prose. It is simply invaluable. The material for this authoritative volume was selected by Stevens’ biographer, Joan Richardson, and Sir Frank Kermode, the distinguished scholar and critic (this reviewer is closely acquainted with both of them). The helpful apparatus includes elaborate textual information, a biographical chronology and occasional notes on the texts themselves. Stevens is a poet who requires rereading after rereading, and new discoveries in his work keep interacting with new knowledge we keep acquiring of ourselves and the rest of the world. But for a figurative Sorbonne of poetically wise readership and vivid interpretation in our culture generally, the text of some terribly important poetic “it” has been gotten more than straight in this most valuable volume.

ROBERT DASSANOWSKY

GRAND PASSION: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond. Edited by Suzanne Lummis and Charles H. Webb . Red Wind Books: 260 pp., $10.95 paper

“Grand Passion: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond” is one of the most satisfying and elegantly produced volumes I have seen in more than a decade, a precarious but highly successful balance of emotion, technique, politics and dreams. Neither a guarded, arid collection of big names and promising personalities nor a subversively obsessed compilation of clumsy sociopolitical protest and shock-aimed posing, “Grand Passion” strives for readability and re-readability. So varied are the styles and motifs in this collection, so representative of gender and culture views and, yes, so well chosen are the republished poems that the reader can return to rediscover and review. “Grand Passion” transcends the Los Angeles scene it succeeds in recording and might well serve as a potent introduction to general late-20th century American verse. Many of these poets, who associate themselves with the city, reach beyond any L.A. stereotypes. There is so much in “Grand Passion” that has never been under a single cover, and yet, there are many who have shared lines and thoughts across the city and the globe. Unusual in such a large grouping, there is not a single throwaway work in the entire collection. Here is a reborn trust in the rough beauty of the concurrent failure and glory of words. One can only hope that Lummis and Webb will give us their collections on a regular basis. This is simply the best of its kind.

ANTHONY DAY

THE ODES OF HORACE. Translated by David Ferry . Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 368 pp., $35

The wise and gentle Horace is one of the most difficult of the classical poets to translate gracefully into English. To render the exquisite force and balance of his freighted Latin into an English that approximates his subtle beauty has been attempted for 450 years, but not often with singular success. David Ferry’s translation of Horace’s odes in this bilingual edition brings to the modern reader a splendid rendition of Horace’s style and meaning. Ferry, an emeritus professor of English at Wellesley College, is a poet and essayist. His verse excellently captures Horace’s often conversational and sometimes ironic mode, which at times resembles that of Robert Frost or W.H. Auden.

OCTAVIO PAZ

POEMS, PROTEST, AND A DREAM. By Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz . Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden . Penguin: 254 pp., $12.95 paper

Sor Juana’s night is not the carnal night of lovers. Neither is it the night of the mystics. It is an intellectual night, constructed above the void, rigorous geometry, taciturn obelisk, all of its fixed tension directed toward the heavens. This vertical impulse is the only thing that recalls other nights of Spanish mysticism. But the mystics seem to be drawn up to heaven by rays of celestial forces. In “First I Dream,” the heavens are closed; the heights are hostile to flight. Silence confronting man: The desire for knowledge is illicit and the soul that dreams of knowledge is rebellious. Nocturnal solitude of the consciousness. Drought, vertigo, palpitation. But, nevertheless, all is not adversity. In his solitude and his fall from the heights, man affirms himself in himself: To know is to dream, but that dream is everything we know of ourselves, and in that dream resides our greatness. It is a game of mirrors in which the soul loses each time it wins and wins each time ambiguity. And Sor Juana’s vertiginous night suddenly reveals its fixed center. “First I Dream” is a poem not of knowledge but of the act of knowing. Thus, Sor Juana transmutes her historical and personal ill fortunes, makes victory of her defeat, song of her silence, liberty of her submission.

JEFFREY MOUSSAIEFF MASSON

THE RAMAYANA: An Epic of Ancient India. Vol. V: The Sundarakanda. Introduction, translation and annotation by Robert P. Goldman and Sally J. Sutherland Goldman. Princeton University Press: 590 pp., $89.50

Goldman and his team of translators and the Princeton University Press have made accessible a work that offers a unique window into a rich and ancient civilization. They present a carefully contextualized and densely annotated literal translation of a text which, like the Bible or the Koran, has profoundly shaped the world we share. The “Ramayana” is at once a remarkable adventure story, a tale of love and war, a meditation on the conflict of emotion and duty, a mirror for kings, a model for traditional society and for hundreds of millions of Hindus in South Asia and the worldwide South Asian diaspora and a history of God made flesh. Beyond that, it is, if not literally the world’s first poem, undoubtedly the first poem to speak seriously about the nature of poetry and the still unfathomed link between art and emotion. To work through this massive and haunting poem is to undertake a serious journey into another world.

FRANCES MAYES

SUN UNDER WOOD. By Robert Hass . The Ecco Press: 88 pp., $22

“Sun Under Wood,” Robert Hass’ fourth book and the first one in seven years, consists of only 20 poems. The voice in these poems connects with his stance as the public voice of poetry. You could give this collection to a friend who says she does not understand poetry, hated poetry ever since her sixth-grade teacher made her memorize “My Last Duchess,” and know that she would find herself drawn in. Beyond that level, however, lies a passionate inquiry into the meanings of experience--especially the nature of happiness--and a sophisticated linguistic power. “Sun Under Wood” is Hass at his best. It is a book to reread, always with the lucky sense of walking through a meadow with a friend, deep in the best kind of exchange.

MARSHALL DE BRUHL

THE ALAMO. By Michael Lind . Houghton Mifflin: 352 pp., $25

Dozens of novels, films, television films, biographies, autobiographies and histories have covered the bloody ground at the Alamo, but no one has had the inspiration, or perhaps the sheer nerve or the talent, to write an epic poem. Lind, happily, has all three. His is a splendid poetic re-creation of the 1836 siege and massacre at the ruined mission of San Antonio de Valera, better known as the Alamo. This new poem, less than 400 pages, comprises 12 books of 858 stanzas and runs to 6,006 lines. Written in rhyme royal--the seven-line stanza rhyming a-b-a-b-b-c-c, which was perfected by Chaucer in the 14th century--”The Alamo” richly evokes the passion, the politics, the bravery, the humanity and the butchery of one of the great events in American history, the Texas Revolution. So wreaths of laurel all around--for the poet, his editor and his publisher.