Similarly, Oliver demonstrates an unsettled verbal mastery in a bravura display, a description of architectural form:
... Complex of
accented runs, angles, drops, sluices,
pumps, ditches, endless unbowed
archways... (lyric 11)
The language here is finely controlled, from the way in which the ‘x’ sound is perfectly balanced in the opening phrase, to the series of falling monosyllables which are released in the enjambed expansiveness of the final phrase with its open vowels. The language is reminiscent of Les Murray’s ‘Bent Water’ (surely Murray’s masterpiece). But the lines I have just quoted continue in rhythms which, while still lyrical, are also more unsettling: ‘archways, treatment ponds breaking into/sunlight’. For where Murray’s language embodies a confident belief in God, Oliver’s has been a celebration of a public sewer - and more to the point, a sewer envisioned but (in an act of creative failure) never built.
Late in the poem, Oliver brings together these themes in a grim reflection upon the role of the poet - in a voice in which the emotion is italicized but never allowed to run outside its bounds:
One quadrant of sky turns,
face up, black as the ace of spades.
Much as a God can manage
muttering from the side of his mouth.
Star flecks, nova spittle. Rage of
emptiness pours through, for the hell
of it, endlessly. Looking back to
what beginning. The whole shebang
advances toward, beyond our
best efforts. We live under a Niagra
of star fall, huge optics dilate time,
blackness like velvet slips over
chrome. Sounds of nothingness
strung between a singlet of lights. (lyric 30).
This is vintage Oliver. The language is elaborate, but perfectly judged, undercut by a colloquial impulse (‘black as the ace of spades’, ‘for the hell / of it’). This undersong speaks of Oliver’s awareness of his place as a poet of the vernacular republic; but it also speaks, in its use of cliche, of a loss of faith in the resources of poetic language.
And something similar can be said of its use of Stevens, for where Stevens is the poet who brought romantic metaphysics to its final crisis, and with it the end of any hope of finding essential meaning in the world, Oliver’s use of Stevens here seems also an act of deliberate failure. The stanza alludes to Stevens’s Jove, a false divinity who ‘moved among us, as a muttering king’ in ‘Sunday Morning’, and to that poem’s existential conclusion that (contra Milton) ‘We live in an old chaos of the sun’. Like Stevens in ‘Key West’, Oliver laments the ‘Blessed rage for order’, the ‘glassy lights’ which gave a bogus sense of structure to the sea. But in a sense, and an important sense, much of the language of Oliver’s stanza is the language of Stevens: it is an eloquent testament to a failure to find in the present a viable voice for poetry.
Clearly there is much in this sequence which I find powerful, and respond to warmly. Many of the lyrics are perfect, and thematically the poem traverses many of the issues which are at the heart of poetry today: from the modernist legacy of deep worries over memory and metaphor, to a more contemporary juxtaposition of dictions and registers, and a concern with post-modernism and the end of history. It is a sequence which is not afraid to take on Stevens, or Milton and Hardy and Auden. But I would like to see it slightly reshaped, for I feel that there is a great poem hiding in here somewhere, if only I could be persuaded more of its motivation. I think fear does lie at the heart of its psychology, but the real fear is artistic rather than political; and if this could be worked more into the texture of the poem, along with some editing of the poem’s middle section, we would have a major achievement not only in Oliver’s oeuvre, but in antipodean writing.