I had no recollection of ordering George David Clark’s Newly Not Eternal, published this year by Louisiana State University Press, though obviously I must have done since it arrived here in Paris last week. Whatever late-night whim prompted me to put in the order and then immediately forget it, it was a good one. This is a very good book of poems: I was moved and amused as well as admiring — these are satisfying poems to read or to say, in which form, theme and rhetoric truly come together.1
I suppose most of my readers already read quite a bit of poetry in English, but even if you don’t — if you’re here more for the Latin, or thoughts on translation, or because you’re my mother (hello!) — I’d recommend this collection. It’s accessible I think in the best way, and actually perhaps more accessible to people who don’t think of themselves as big readers of contemporary poetry than those who do. If you read the piece about verse for children a fortnight ago and thought, to be honest, Julia Donaldson and Peepo are about my level, much past that I don’t quite get it: well, for a start, you have a good ear since Donaldson, as was much discussed in the comments, is a fine poet, and secondly, George David Clark is just the sort of “adult” poet you might want to try. I mean that, like Donaldson, he is putting his very considerable set of technical skills and expertise at your service as a reader: though many of these poems deal with the most difficult of themes, there is nothing at all difficult about the verse itself. Several of the best pieces here, a little like some of the best of Wendy Cope, distract you with the nursery-rhyme pleasures of the form so much that the wit and wisdom of the ending lands like a blow. Here’s the beginning and end of ‘A Few Keys’:
This is the keyto my pickupand this is the keyto my home.The key to my laptopis letters and symbols;my birthdate’s the keyto my phone.I once stole a keyto a diaryand once turned a keymade of bone.What this key can doI’ve forgotten.This key is some otherkey’s clone.[. . .]The last key of courseis a wristwatch.I turn it by sittingstock still,by letting the cloudsturn around me,by adding more drinksto my bill.Eventually everythingopens: the bluefist of evening, the mawin these rocks.With a clickit all fastensbehind me. This last keyis also a lock.
The title phrase of the collection, ‘newly not eternal’, is taken from a touching poem about a newborn child, ‘The First Supper’, and refers also to a linked series of seven poems (‘Ultrasound: Your Picture’, ‘Ultrasound: Your Mirror’, and so on) which evoke very movingly the loss of a twin during pregnancy: the child who will never be ‘newly not eternal’ in this way. Many readers will turn to these poems first.
For my part, I particularly enjoyed a handful of poems with a bit more of an ‘edge’, in which a hint of peculiarly adult nastiness sounds a very effective counterpoint to the sing-song, nursery associations of Clark’s most common forms. This is from ‘Ambitious Circumcision’:
Carve a soft ring of skin offmy penis.Nip a lobe of pink meat offmy spleen.Lop the tip of my peacockingtongue off.Pare the sex and the race offmy genes.Put the scalpel to each ofmy fingersand peel back their singularwhorls.Cut the consciousness clean frommy ego.Flense my last layer of self offthe world.[. . .]
Though it doesn’t quite say so, this startling poem is a prayer, which sounds — for me — the authentic and unsanitised note of the best religious verse. I thought of Jonson: ‘I feel my griefs too, and there scarce is ground / Upon my flesh t’inflict another wound’ (from ‘To Heaven’). Newly Not Eternal is a book about what it is to have been born — as we have all been — or to exist without having been born (like the lost baby, or like angels, who also make frequent appearances). It is certainly, though implicitly, also about the incarnation: in the fable of the long poem, ‘The Statue Gardens’, everyone gets a statue when they turn 33, and one piece is called ‘Iscariot’s Psalm’. But it’s not at all a preachy or pious book, and most of the scriptural and religious references are lightly worn.
The book is in three main sections, plus a brief introductory poem (‘Mosquito’, an unexpected link to D. H. Lawrence, whom I wrote about last week) plus the interesting verse fable, ‘The Statue Gardens’, which comes between sections 2 and 3. Some variant of this format seems quite common, even in collections which are otherwise very different from one another: of books I’ve read right through fairly recently, I thought of the three (remarkable) long poems, ‘What the Buddha saw’ at the end of Carola Luther’s Walking the Animals, which I wrote about here, and ‘The Mourning Virtuoso’ in Peter Davidson’s Arctic Elegies (which I reviewed here). Sometimes a single long piece like this can feel disruptive, as if the poet just wants to show that they can do something different; sometimes it points beyond the book in a tantalising way: the sequences in both the Davidson and Luther books do just this, and raise the game of their entire collections.
I don’t think ‘The Statue Gardens’ quite achieves this kind of heightening. I found it engaging, and its experiment in fable is an interesting contrast to the directness of the rest of the book, but I also found it a little whimsical — partly perhaps because unlike the Davidson and Luther examples and despite its length, its tone and form is not very different from the other poems. Almost all of these poems are written in short or very short lines, and this is true of ‘The Statue Gardens’ too. There’s a risk in such consistency: the verse trips along very neatly, but can end up seeming light or samey, without enough poetic key-changes. Indeed, in a few cases, the poems feel like slightly underwritten versions of more ambitious pieces: if you enjoy the conceit of ‘Still Life’ (‘Peculiar how the olio / of days and rain and sun / inside a grape can taste / so much like time itself’), I refer you to Tony Harrison’s fantastic ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’. But these are minor quibbles: I will certainly be ordering Clark’s earlier book, Reveille, as well.
I’ve read quite a few collections by American poets recently that feel somewhat similar to Newly Not Eternal — I mean with a comparable combination of clarity, accessibility, rhetorical control and formal flair, writing broadly in the tradition of Yvor Winters, Richard Wilbur and, of course, that honorary American, Auden. The best of these were perhaps Joshua Mehigan’s Accepting the Disaster (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014) and Boris Dralyuk’s My Hollywood (Paul Dry Books, 2022). In American terms they would probably all be described as ‘Formalists’ (or even ‘New Formalists’, though that term is perhaps a bit dated now?). American poets in this vein are not all men, though they do seem to be men more often than not — the obvious exception is A. E. Stallings, now Professor of Poetry at Oxford, whose selected poems This Afterlife came out last year. Stallings has lived in Greece, for many years, though, and also has a stronger connection with the UK than the others; her work in general seems to me closer to UK poetry than the others, and in fact when I started reading her I didn’t initially realise she was American (rather than British) at all. Apparently formal verse is a rather macho affair for Americans, or perhaps I just haven’t come across many of the women working in this style.
Such tight, shapely collections are a great pleasure, but I do enjoy reading a range of types of poetry. In the UK, as I have noted before, there is a broad, rich and, I think, undervalued seam of contemporary poets who, though they may not that often win the big prizes, typically write in a range of forms and whose default poem is neither an established form with a single metre or rhyme scheme, nor completely free verse — though generally speaking they write and publish both of these too — but something in the middle: strongly musical verse which often makes some use of rhyme and alludes to common measures but in a looser way. Peter Davidson, though more inclined to use set forms than others in this category, is often at his best when he writes in this way, and one could add dozens of names, ranging from the most remarkable of contemporary British poets (such as Gillian Allnut, whom I wrote about briefly here) to a host of lesser-known but accomplished poets, including Carola Luther. I have often wondered why I don’t seem to come across US poets writing like this, and I suppose it must have something to do with the peculiar politicization of the form/free distinction in America, in a way which just isn’t the case in the UK (or indeed, as far as I can tell and as far as one can meaningfully compare, in France). But if you are aware of exceptions, do let me know.
Americans are perhaps just more thorough-going than the British. In poetry, American sincerity and enthusiasm is associated for me, too, with a completely different type of poetry, what I tend to think of (because I am a classicist) as the ‘American Pindaric’ — poetry in the style of, say, Hart Crane or Robert Duncan, which is unafraid of a vatic, visionary or even ecstatic mode.2 I love both these poets, and have a particular soft spot for Duncan, whose mature poetry is very far removed indeed from Clark’s (although we might feel it has quite a lot in common with D. H. Lawrence, both in its strengths and its weaknesses).
It may be easier now, but when I first started reading Duncan, nearly 20 years ago, it was very hard to get hold of his poetry in the UK: I did a lot of ferreting around online and waited patiently for several things ordered from the States.3 It’s also hard to quote effectively from him because his most characteristic poems are long and their effect is cumulative — one of the most often anthologised is ‘Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar’, which you can read here.4 I also particularly like ‘Often I am permitted to return to a meadow’, ‘Poetry, a natural thing’ and ‘After a passage in Baudelaire’ (a good one for any French readers). And here’s the end of the remarkable, quite early poem ‘My mother would be a falconress’ (you can read the whole thing here):
My mother would be a falconress,and even now, years after this,when the wounds I left her had surely heald,and the woman is dead,her fierce eyes closed, and if her heartwere broken, it is stilldI would be a falcon and go free.I tread her wrist and wear the hood,talking to myself, and would draw blood.
I’m not honestly sure how much Duncan is still read and taught in the US, but I would be fascinated to know which contemporary American poets you think of as writing in this ‘American Pindaric’ tradition. Do comment or email with your thoughts.
I notice that people are often suspicious of the term ‘rhetoric’ as if it must be a bad thing or imply insincerity of some sort: but I just mean the crafting of the shape and pace of a piece of writing such that it best suits its subject and its intended effect.
There’s a strong French modernist tradition in a comparable style, like the great odes of Paul Claudel and Saint-John Perse, but I can’t think of much at all in British English.
I remember clearly that I first read some Duncan in Michael Schmidt’s wonderful Harvill Book of 20th Century Poetry in English, which I bought in the Oxford branch of the sadly-missed Borders. For my money this is still the best anthology for any relatively experienced readers of British poetry who wants to gain more of a feel for the American tradition and how it fits in with the poetry they already know. (It may work very well also the other way round.)
This is a great essay and touches on something I've often reflected on over the last couple decades: the distinction between English and American poets' use of form. You mention, and I think rightly, that English poets often write in a manner that nods to meter and rhyme (the Eliotic "ghost of meter") even in free verse poems while American poets either write in free verse or meter. In one respect this is the case. I was just reading Paterson's old anthology "New British Poetry," and I was a little disappointed that, despite the claims of the introduction, so few of the poems really gave much of a sense of any kind of meter. Not that there were not quite a few, but there were fewer than the introduction suggested. Strangely, the Michael Donaghy selection (American born; British death) contained very loose work with scarcely a trace of metrical pattern, whereas most of his work does exhibit something between the metrical and the free.
In any case, overall, I think your statement is just. The Irish poet Conor O'Callaghan once related the anecdote to me that an American poet asked if "the new formalism had come to Britain," and the one asked replied, "No, we just have the old formalism." Conor thought this a deprecation of English practice; I thought it a sign that free verse was just another technique in England, whereas in America it had long been a weird ideological "patriotic" principle for many.
On the American side of things, however, I think you are a little bit off in your observation. You are right that the vast, vast majority of American free verse poets betray not the slightest inkling of any of the practices of rhyme and meter in their work. As a rule, that's because they don't know how any of it works. I don't know how things stand in England, but for the majority of such American poets, the whole literary tradition prior to the twentieth century is a foreign land that has nothing to do with them. But I would suggest taking a second look at the poets who were first heralded under the "new formalist" label. If you look at their work, it is very rarely strictly metrical and very frequently their books blend metrical and free verse poems and also engage in what one of the new formalists called "semi-metrical" poems (Marilyn Taylor). A good number of the new formalists read English poets in the eighties and nineties and probably modeled their practice on what they saw occurring in the mainstream of English poetry at that time. Mary Jo Salter, Brad Leithauser, and others rarely write a wholly metrical poem. The obvious exception is Timothy Steele, but that is because he came to the new formalism out of the Wintersian tradition, whereas most of the other new formalists did not.
I confess I’m not the biggest fan of poems about poetry, so maybe that partly explains why I never took to Duncan. Looking him up in a couple of college textbooks/anthologies here, I found no trace, so I think you’re correct, that he’s not read or taught much, if he ever was.
Possibly Tracy K. Smith hits the visionary note you’re thinking of, at least she did a dozen years ago in her Life on Mars collection:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55518/the-universe-as-primal-scream