“I substitute have seen
you for will see./Tenses shift and I prepare for memory.”
Those lines, the final
in-stanza couplet from “Crooked Eclipses”, Richard Greene’s poem from Dante’s
House, capture the backward transitional movement of psychological time,
but Greene has consistently gazed over his shoulder, in this collection as in
his previous, Boxing the Compass. Even in his personal travel pieces,
the past constantly merges with the present, and is often more vivid than
reachable church stone or “ten fantini sitting on bareback steeds”. That
said, his observational powers are very good. Greene’s mind is equable, and
many of the conclusions drawn are doubting, provisional, withheld, or
impossible. Unlike instances in Boxing the Compass, there’s more of,
“Those roads wind among degrees of sorrow/I cannot imagine” (from “The Idea of
Order at Port-au-Prince”), and I, for one, am grateful for it.
The latter poem’s title is
in some way a response, obviously, to Wallace Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at
Key West”, which could just as easily have been headed as “The Idea of Disorder”.
Greene, then, isn’t indulging in irony when observing the broken political
reality and broken men and women that he sees during a Haiti excursion. A
narrative poet often drawn to the elegiac mode, Greene’s lyrical skills are
rarely virtuosic, though the approach is purposely understated, even at
heightened interludes. At times, though, a memorable sequence will make the
reader (this one, at least) pause. One example: Greene, in his “The Idea of
Order at Port-au-Prince”, agrees with Stevens’ philosophical stance of
manpersonwomankind’s rage for meaning, but undercuts it in practical necessity,
with “Rebuilding is a matter of cinder-/block and thickets of rebar rising
up/the mountain’s steep face”.
The sameness of colour in
the first eleven one-to-five pagers – measured, sympathetic, commemorative –
makes it more important than usual that content, in isolation, be interesting.
This is, of course, highly subjective, reader to reader. I found the two-part
“Corrections” a highlight: horrifying mini-studies of doomed prisoners “rip[ping]/open
the skin and muscle with their hands.” Greene’s strength, though – (I’ll
shortly get to that) – is absent by constriction. The poet obviously can’t
enter the troubed lives of these unfortunate men in any meaningful way from a
one-visit tour. A lowlight was “Yankee Stadium”, a fond homage to the Yankee
“mystique”. Rhapsodizing over
ballooning multi-millionaires becomes, itself, weirdly inflated as one ages and
the corporate chess-players shift and pluck from the green board.
The approach and sequencing
between Boxing the Compass and Dante’s House is the same. Shorter
considerations act as substantial appetizers to the last poem, in this case the
titular 32 page travelogue-memorial. So I was surprised to find my evaluations,
book-to-book, reversed: “Dante’s House”, after the collection’s uneven first
half, knocks it out of any open space, whether Yankee Stadium or the Grand
Canyon. The aptly-named poem’s impulse is self-evident. Structured in
twenty-nine tercet-descending terza rima stanzas, the formidable formal
constraint works astonishingly well. It’s not a boastful marathon exercise. The
one-step-back-two-steps-forward foray of the rhyme scheme captures Greene’s
often tentative experiences on foreign soil, trying to communicate with
strangers in Berlitz Italian, and interpreting actions and dialogue,
self-consciously, through a different cultural and historical lens. (For that
matter, the backward-forward steps work as fitting image of a Dante troubled by
the Inferno’s upcoming, deeper circle.) But the pattern also enhances Greene’s
quieter connections between the past as it manifests in the present (Faulkner
is useful to think about here), not just in how Il Duce’s sins live on in the
shattered lives of victims’ descendants, but in Greene’s own ruminations on his
mother’s troubles and ultimate death. His strength in bridging time and
geography, others with himself, is utterly mellifluous and convincing. To
accomplish that narratively within the demanding long-poem constraints of the
form (I only counted one egregious choice – “move slowly past in their
pageantry of tum-//ult.” is the end-move to “come” and “drum”) is even more
impressive. One reason attention isn’t called to the procedure, like an annoyed
and dissatisfied audience member lifting the curtain in front of the hand
puppet, has to do with Greene’s prosodic variance. Many readers, even studious
poets, frequently belittle rhyme in a free(r) verse milieu, but a far more
damning clunkfest has to do with repetitive metre. Gimme ingenious rhymes all
day; just don’t dress them up in military iambics.
There are many other
elements to trumpet in “Dante’s House”, and though I can’t get to them all, I’d
like to point to a few more. Lyricism is enhanced, in contrast to the book’s
first half, throughout the long poem. “Bungling shrinks tinkered with her
sanity” is the closest Greene gets to anger, but it’s the sounds, not the tone,
one remembers. The concluding line of that penultimate stanza – “Love was taken
from me, yet I rejoice” – is simple and heartbreaking, a closing benediction on
three interspersed sections concentrating on his mother, itself a spur to a
spiritual strength which surpasses the milder, received grace of Italian
architecture and biography and interaction, though these, too, are noteworthy.
Like “The Divine Comedy”, Greene’s scope encompasses all kinds of figures -- political,
artistic, religious, and intellectual. Catherine of Alexandria is given thirty
lines of stanza twelve, and, typical of Greene’s seamless weaving, he manages
to distill complex, provocative and disputatious subject matter into personal
wisdom. The future martyr is “a late child among twenty-five,/little wonder she
preferred constraint//to bed and breeding.” Conversion, Greene seems to
believe, followed more easily, perhaps even as a practical inevitability, from
her early experiences, and in that way may not have been the unexplained event,
the more sensational miracle. Umberto is Green’s Virgilian guide, and if the
author doesn’t mythologize his helpers, he certainly colours them liberally
with fond idiosyncrasy, as Umberto “summons dark humour/and blows away his
temple with a finger.” The poem’s
length lets Greene rummage, ruminate, travel without conclusion, stumble,
misconstrue, prevail, and “rejoice” with “a power to bless”. “Dante’s House” is
more expansive and more concentrated than “Over the Border”, the
similarly structured long end-piece to his previous volume which won the
Canadian Gov-Gen award. This poem is far more deserving of accolades, and I
hope he receives them.
