In the late Sixties, I discovered post-World War II poetry, thanks in large part to Donald Hall, who had brought the best of the best contemporary writers to read and talk and who had nurtured a remarkable community of poets on The University of Michigan campus. I had read Hall's early formalist stuff, which I liked a lot. However, I found his switch to Deep Imagism lacking. To me, it took him a couple of books to master the new approach. After that, he scored just about every time.
Poets usually write about what matters to them or, more importantly, about what they think they can express. For example, a published poet I know gets extremely moved by the music of Vaughan Williams but has no words for it. Consequently, he doesn't write about it. Hall has almost always written about what matters to him, although he also writes playful poems, jeux d'esprit, and the occasional pastiche, not quite parody. He has a virtuosity about him, not only formally (his invention of the "baseball" form, for example - 9 syllables, 9 lines, 9 stanzas), but in the ability to construct tidy, complex "action" images. However, I've noticed that such images have become fewer and fewer in the later collections.
Apparently, this worries Hall, now 83, who more than once in this collection refers to himself as having lost poetry, love, and sex. I don't know about the last two, but he's clearly wrong about the first. This is a very strong set indeed. Again, the virtuosic images have become fewer, and Hall's writing has become more direct, less figurative. This may well worry him because of the continuing dominion of the tenets of Deep Image. However, we would do well to remember that not all great poetry works this way. Aside from straightforward simile and metaphor, Sophocles, for example, writes pretty directly, as does Catullus. The poetry works very well, thank you.
Hall obviously sees his end. The poems concern memories, loss, death, and the pull of the past. This last shows up overtly and subtly, as in "Goosefeathers," where the transports get progressively older: streamline train, taxi, "black locomotive," horse and buggy. foot. Loss appears in poems about the end of an affair, the death of the poet's wife, the illness of a child. Hall contemplates his own death and the deaths of friends, with almost no sentimentality at all. Even when it does appear (the dog searching for the poet's dead wife in "Searching"), it feels genuine and thus not sentimental at all. It's as if Hall himself waits for his lost wife to come into the house again.
The past becomes a way to talk about what survives. Long ago, Hall made the insane bargain for literary immortality. I believe he has at least a shot. Yet, he sacrificed a lot for it. For the past forty years, he's lived by his wits, writing magazine articles, prose non-fiction, sports books, art criticism, lecturing, teaching occasionally, and reading from his work -- all to make money. Poetry, what he really wants to do, can't possibly pay the bills. The consolation, therefore, lies in people remembering your work when you're gone, and Hall is pretty realistic about the odds. The thought gnaws at him: What if he lost the bet?
Personally, I think it's the wrong way to look at it, but, then, I'm not a poet and, of course, I'm not Hall. Hall writes, it seems to me, because the bug bit him early. At this point, he writes because he wants to make sense of his life. Eternal fame would be lagniappe. However, most reading Americans don't read even Robert Frost any more.
I've always liked about Hall's work its emotional mess. He doesn't always have answers, unlike many Deep Imagists who rely on a Jungian scaffolding to achieve Significance and who, in a lot of cases, kid themselves. Hall can also fall into self-deception, but not for lack of trying to connect his inner and outer life and without resort to metastructure. He doesn't seem to misrepresent the facts to achieve a "poetic" resolution. Indeed, quite a few of his poems end up in a quandary about what they mean. To me, this is real honesty from a writer who has the technique, if he wanted, to arrive at a falsely-secure shore.
There are simply too many wonderful poems in this book to single them all out. I especially liked "The Things," every single "baseball" poem in the book, "Green Farmhouse Chairs" in particular, "The Week," the aforementioned "Searching" (it risks and wins much) and "Goosefeathers," and "The Back Chamber." There are formal verse patterns, pantoums (I think), even a jump-rope rhyme, although on a grim theme.
The most controversial poem in the book is the longest "Ric's Progress." Like the Hogarth paintings, it tells a familiar story. Ric marries young, has affairs, divorces his wife, acts out during the divorce, has more affairs, tries to commit suicide, undergoes therapy (not entirely successful there), and finally meets a woman he can live with. For many people, "familiar" means "trite." I admit I didn't take to the poem at first, but during subsequent readings, the thought popped into my head of Tennyson's Enoch Arden -- in other words, a Moral Tale for the Age, just like Hogarth's "Rake's Progress." If I had really paid attention to the title, of course, it wouldn't have taken so long for the penny to drop. The moral of each age -- Hogarth's, Tennyson's, and our own -- differs. Hogarth preaches moderation, Tennyson self-sacrifice and duty. Significantly, it's hard to fix upon our moral. For me, it's something like "Love comes rarely. It comes at once or gradually or not at all. Do as much as you can to keep it when you find it."
