be
sui generis
.
One essential aspect of Miss Garrigue’s work is the presence in it of unseen forces, in the Yeatsian sense. The flowing of a mysterious charged current, especially near water or in lonely places. She is content to record it as part of her experience, interprets it pantheistically,and regards herself as part of its experience in turn. From her text it is doubtful whether she had any deeper or more exact knowledge, and she abandons mysticism the moment it no longer serves her literary purpose.
In her case this was certainly the right decision. The subject carries for most people dangerously airy-fairy overtones. Although paradoxically they also believe that this is what poetry is really about. Perhaps they dimly comprehend that human development is morally related to other words, other dimensions, which they only sense. We can only measure the importance of these strange influences by noting what happens when we are cut off from them; shut away in cities, locked into our own thoughts which harden like concrete, we become angry and ill. Whatever the case may be, they assisted Miss Garrigue to write a fine poem, ‘There Is a Dark River’, from an early book
The Monument Rose
. Between what is actually seen, and what is only felt, she is able to intimate an otherworldly aliveness collected under dark trees.
There is a dark river flows under a bridge
Making an elbowed turn where the swallows skim
Indescribably dark in rain.
sets the scene, and although Yeats’s influence is soaked into her lines here:
Those oblivion-haunted ones who wrote
Memorable words on the window pane,
What but the diamond’s firmness gives them name?
And yet because they did it
The field is thick with spirit.
due to the beauty of the expression, the poem manages to assert itself, and in the end holds its own.
In her last book she has made an effort to bring both sensibility and manner up to date; possibly she had at last woken up to the fact that her traditional poetic abilities were strangling her. The mixture is of old and new. But she begins to know herself well enough to hear her own voice. Here it is in this good opening of ‘The Grand Canyon’:
Where is the restaurant cat?
I am lonely under the fluorescent light
as a cook waddles in her smoky region visible through an open arch
and someone is pounding, pounding
whatever it is that is being pounded
The poem goes on to describe the canyon throughout nine extremely long stanzas. Nevertheless, there is in general a much greater variety of line treatment, much firmer ground in the way of angular, dense description. She has been forced by the subject, a wholly American subject, to write a non-European poem. There is no precedent for gathering up the whole by intuition. The material defies it in any case. Thus she is thrown back on herself and writes an original poem. As a consequence, there is only one appearance of Yeats, a mere nod, a long-legged insect (never, even for Yeats, a successful image) worked into a context entirely foreign to it in the last stanza when invention was beginning to flag. The poem softens shortly afterward and closes on a conceit; and although this is welded on to the new-look verses so that the join can hardly be seen, it has in fact nothing to do with the poem’s primary conception and logic. In a natural desire to finish off by transcending gross matter, she loosens her grip and the old habits of mind reassert themselves:
under those clouds that like water lilies
enclose within them this silence received
that they graze upon and are gone.
Miss Garrigue’s line always sees further possibilities in itself, and the irrelevancies it produces, which are then carefully embedded in the poems, are usually the best part. In which case they
are
the poem, and the poem is the irrelevance. Here is one of her striking images: ‘the wind walked on the roof like a boy’ – not factually accurate, but carrying an original concept of a wind (with
sui generis
.
One essential aspect of Miss Garrigue’s work is the presence in it of unseen forces, in the Yeatsian sense. The flowing of a mysterious charged current, especially near water or in lonely places. She is content to record it as part of her experience, interprets it pantheistically,and regards herself as part of its experience in turn. From her text it is doubtful whether she had any deeper or more exact knowledge, and she abandons mysticism the moment it no longer serves her literary purpose.
In her case this was certainly the right decision. The subject carries for most people dangerously airy-fairy overtones. Although paradoxically they also believe that this is what poetry is really about. Perhaps they dimly comprehend that human development is morally related to other words, other dimensions, which they only sense. We can only measure the importance of these strange influences by noting what happens when we are cut off from them; shut away in cities, locked into our own thoughts which harden like concrete, we become angry and ill. Whatever the case may be, they assisted Miss Garrigue to write a fine poem, ‘There Is a Dark River’, from an early book
The Monument Rose
. Between what is actually seen, and what is only felt, she is able to intimate an otherworldly aliveness collected under dark trees.
There is a dark river flows under a bridge
Making an elbowed turn where the swallows skim
Indescribably dark in rain.
sets the scene, and although Yeats’s influence is soaked into her lines here:
Those oblivion-haunted ones who wrote
Memorable words on the window pane,
What but the diamond’s firmness gives them name?
And yet because they did it
The field is thick with spirit.
due to the beauty of the expression, the poem manages to assert itself, and in the end holds its own.
In her last book she has made an effort to bring both sensibility and manner up to date; possibly she had at last woken up to the fact that her traditional poetic abilities were strangling her. The mixture is of old and new. But she begins to know herself well enough to hear her own voice. Here it is in this good opening of ‘The Grand Canyon’:
Where is the restaurant cat?
I am lonely under the fluorescent light
as a cook waddles in her smoky region visible through an open arch
and someone is pounding, pounding
whatever it is that is being pounded
The poem goes on to describe the canyon throughout nine extremely long stanzas. Nevertheless, there is in general a much greater variety of line treatment, much firmer ground in the way of angular, dense description. She has been forced by the subject, a wholly American subject, to write a non-European poem. There is no precedent for gathering up the whole by intuition. The material defies it in any case. Thus she is thrown back on herself and writes an original poem. As a consequence, there is only one appearance of Yeats, a mere nod, a long-legged insect (never, even for Yeats, a successful image) worked into a context entirely foreign to it in the last stanza when invention was beginning to flag. The poem softens shortly afterward and closes on a conceit; and although this is welded on to the new-look verses so that the join can hardly be seen, it has in fact nothing to do with the poem’s primary conception and logic. In a natural desire to finish off by transcending gross matter, she loosens her grip and the old habits of mind reassert themselves:
under those clouds that like water lilies
enclose within them this silence received
that they graze upon and are gone.
Miss Garrigue’s line always sees further possibilities in itself, and the irrelevancies it produces, which are then carefully embedded in the poems, are usually the best part. In which case they
are
the poem, and the poem is the irrelevance. Here is one of her striking images: ‘the wind walked on the roof like a boy’ – not factually accurate, but carrying an original concept of a wind (with
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