Poets’ Corner

THE LITTLE FIELD OF THE SELF

By Doreen Gildroy

University of Chicago Press:

72 pp., $28

Doreen Gildroy’s first book, “The Little Field of the Self,” has the feel of a very private miracle. The sense of self-containment in these poems is steady and enlightened. Each poem seems to quietly dare itself to go on: then goes on, shifting out of intention into a confident unornamented eloquence. “A condition of unmoved calm” is a phrase she borrows from the ancient philosopher Plotinus, as her own “calm” deepens into unswerving emotion by listening to itself, to its own rapt language.

In the garden the cut stalks

feel the wind and

have no resistance to it, moving

and being moved again.

These poems (coalescing into one long poem) are set in Brittany, France, in a castle with a moat guarded by quacking ducks and geese as well as a fairy tale forest, yet they never seem “staged.” The serene gravity of this debut collection is attended by a sense of enchantment so convincing that the poems, like a tapestry, come alive as both the subject and object of desire.

We are privileged to behold the Land and the Unicorn here in one hypnotic raveling and unraveling skein, a word whose double meaning (either a bundle of thread or a flock of geese in flight) suggests the kind of delicately spun spell Gildroy casts. Beneath the mirror surface of her ruminations, archetypal shapes gather power, and the reader gazes, rapt, at the luminous and riveting field of the poet’s self.

*

NECESSITY

By Peter Sacks

W.W. Norton: 96 pp., $23.95

Peter Sacks, in his fifth collection of poems, “Necessity,” also meditates on Plotinus: “... one must oneself become Spirit, and oneself become vision.” According to Plotinus, the Soul can apprehend the world only successively and severally, thus creating time and space. Sacks’ attenuated, beautifully hesitant style consciously re-creates this limitation of Soul, through a profoundly mimetic sense of the illusions of time and space.

The poems in “Necessity” spare themselves little. Sacks begins his “apprehension” of the so-called knowable world in his native South Africa, tracking its fierce beauty and conflict; moving on to contemporary America and its moral chaos--letting all of damaged reality think and rethink its own Mind:

Wind, work, mockery--

a ribbon of stiff dirt laid to one side where hardpan broke.

The racket clatters on. The god terms change. The images of mind.

And farther on, with startling lyrical precision:

Who’ll toss the boy a coin? This far

from where we should have given up--

thunder & a hundred miles

of uncut grasses swaying in the memory of rain.

Those “uncut grasses swaying” are as real and as illusory as the sense of justice toward which these poems gravitate in their torn beauty. “Necessity,” as the ancient texts tell us, “knows no law” and is blind into the bargain. It is no accident that the last lines of this masterful book cry out to an eyeless, unheeding god.

*

HIP LOGIC

By Terrance Hayes

Penguin: 96 pp., $16 paper

Terrance Hayes is a difficult poet to describe, and “Hip Logic” is a book like no other. Hayes’ attentiveness to the material world is as arresting and acute as his liftoffs into abstraction. The solemn open mouth of an infant is as exact and as exacting an image for the poet as his more fanciful and phenomenological task: “like trying/to slow light down to a trot.”

“Hip Logic,” Hayes’ second book, is congratulated, in a press release, for confronting “racism, sexism, religion, family structure and stereotypes,” and it does all that. But it also documents such a visceral and brainy delight in language that the human political issues represented here are even more dramatically compelling to the reader:

Some cruise with detachable faces

on their radios. The grief latent

in speed limits and zip codes.

The evening between evenings.

Stalls with locked doors.

Some leave their car windows

cracked & a boomboomboom

rustles the neighborhood.

Hayes uses the classic villanelle form (“Broken Dangerfield Newby Villanelle”) to write movingly of Dangerfield Newby, one of the five black men involved in John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. He also plays linguistic games, words inside words, in a most clever series of poem-puzzles.

His range, like his original music, is that of a bold virtuoso and a fearless chronicler of character: Big Bird, Paul Robeson and Balthus all sound off in these revelatory poems. Whether hip or Horatian, the imaginative logic in these poems is irrefutable.