Review
Sensuous Pilgrim
Poetry Flash

 

 

 



Review by Alan Williamson
The Stonecutter's Hand, by Richard Tillinghast, David R. Godine, Boston, 1995, 65 pages, $19.95 cloth

 

I don't know if Richard Tillinghast's Sleep Watch was a formative first book for many readers my age. It was for me. Like others of our generation, Tillinghast turned to the lyrical interiority of Wright, Merwin, and-in his case-Dickey, for some alternative to the overwhelming presence of Lowell and his contemporaries. But where other poets took this influence in the direction of a tough minimalism later satirized as "stones-and-bones" or "one-of-the-guys surrealism." Tillinghast's version was expansive, opulent, synaesthetic. Near Eastern "alluvial cit[ies] / where clerks were napping in the fly-blown hockshops'; memories of childhood amusement parks; worlds inside radiator pipes, with drowned voices "crying down the gently sloshing paths of stone"; Egyptian hieroglyphics about to burst into revelations. . . This poetry spoke particularly to those for whom the sixties counterculture, with its head shops and hand painted ties, its insistence on giving the senses and the imagination more place in life, the schematic intellect less, pointed not only to the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, but to Blake and Baudelaire.

One learned from Tillinghast that stylistic ease and splendor did not have to be contrary principles. I would like to quote one of my favorite poems entire, though it is not countercultural, rather pastoral, looking back to Tillinghast's Tennessee childhood:

   In the Country You Breathe Right    and sleep
   in a single breath
   the length of the darkness    Things are
   as you remember them—
   a calf drinking milk that sloshes through a sieve
   a cat running down a well
   ferns growing through a roof.
   You can hear a leaf
   scrape
   down the road forty feet.    Everything is wood smoke
   and the smell of planked fish.
   The fire logs hiss
   into the river.
   Our shoes are muddy
   from when we fed the horses—
   wifely, uxorious
   they steamed in the March air
   as they turned away toward the forest.

   My hands are so cold
   I hope you can read this.

The short, or else drifting, unpunctuated lines (Merwin's legacy) catch the state of letting oneself get lost in the world of the senses, as well as the haiku-like keenness of each sensation. The end, I think, catches something further—a fear of loss of self in "turn[ing] away" from the human community, passing over the limits of habitual consciousness—that only a very attuned, or very honest, poet would record. The quick-cut boldness of the last two lines has always struck me as owing something to the popular songs of our generation, whose syncopated cadences can be heard clearly in the last verse of the suicide-fantasy "Goodbye":

   Now it will surely happen
   Nothing further to
   Wrap him!      not my
   -Knocking the faces off, all
   over now.

It's always interesting when a poet who has so thoroughly mastered either free verse of form turns to its opposite in mid-career. In Tillinghast's case, I think it's the end of a long evolution, personal as much as literary. Tillinghast committed himself to the counterculture much more whole-heartedly than most Eastern/Southern, 'academic' poets I knew did. There are stories of his students sitting in a circle chatting mantras under his colleagues' office windows. For a short while he became a Sufi, and called himself by an Islamic name. All this probably cost him his job at UC Berkeley; though many in our generation were treated harshly, come tenure time, by the same institutions that had wooed us so lavishly in the palmier job market of the late sixties. Years of wandering and short term jobs followed (including one teaching prisoners at San Quentin) before Tillinghast settled at the University of Michigan in the early eighties. His middle books, especially The Knife, record the stunned frustration and disorientation of having truly believed in the values of the sixties, and then being left high and dry, as the country hurried to forget that decade, as truthfully as I've seen it captured anywhere.

Yet all of this was not an unmixed blessing, poetically. Though involved with large questions, especially political ones, Tillinghast has always been, first and foremost, a poet of the senses. The "sober coloring from an eye / That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality"—to quote Wordsworth—robbed him of the quickness and airiness of Sleep Watch. When that happened, his free-verse cataloguing, though never uninteresting, became a little slack and automatic, mirroring the discouragement in the content. Poets as gifted as Tillinghast know, at some level, when something like that happens in their work, and set out, however unconsciously, to correct it; or else they die as poets.    Listen, with all this in mind, to the first stanza of one of Tillinghast's new poems in meter, "First Morning Home Again":

   Long sleep.    Coffee by noon or thereabouts.
   Wild daffodils you gathered blooming to fullness
   By the window, open-mouthed and idle as rowboats
   Along the quay in the Sunday village stillness.
   The most elusive member of the parish,
   The transiting, kidglove-colored woodpigeon-
   Peaceable, with a saint's name in Irish—
   Peregrinates through the fruit trees in our garden.
   With a voice like Columba palumbus, her name in Latin.

"Without invention nothing is well spaced," William Carlos Williams wrote. The formal inventions here—from the opening spondee on "Long sleep," to the shift from iambs to anapests that centers the last line around the Latin name—are ways of spacing perception, measuring its rhythm in consciousness, without falling into the monotony of catalogue. The are a recovery, by different means, of the alertness and joy of Sleep Watch. (So Hopkinsians counterpoint—falling rhythm where rising is expected—gives a slight rallentando to "Sunday village stillness," rhymed against the gorgeous rush of "blooming to fullness." Etc., etc.)

Tillinghast's title, The Stonecutter's Hand, proclaims his allegiance to these opportunities offered by formal verse. It echoes the nineteenth century French poet Theophile Gautier's "L'art," a crucial text for Baudelaire, the Parnassians, and Pound:

Oui, l'oeuvre sort plus belle
   D'une forme au travail
      Rebelle,
   Vers, marbre, onyx, émail . . . .

   Sculpte, lime, cisèle:
   Que ton reve flottant
      Se scelle
   Dans le bloc résistant!

("Yes, the work will come out more beautiful from a form that rebels against your labor-verse, marble, onyx, enamel. . . . Sculpt, file down, chisel; that your floating dream may seal itself in the resistant block!")

Tillinghast's work is equally intransigent against contemporary fashion in including learning, and in regarding learning, lightly borne, as an aspect of pleasure. So, as we've already noted, he delights in pointing out the un-Saussurean correspondence of the "name in Latin" to its object. So the one long, unusual word in the stanza—"Peregrinates," with its medieval sense of 'pilgrim', corresponding to the "saint's name"—fits Eliot's definition of "the formal word precise but not pedantic."

One interesting side effect of Tillinghast's return to form is that, when he does still use free verse, its possibilities, too, seem to sparkle by the contrast. A kind of throwaway, deadpan humor as always been one of Tillinghast's great gifts, and I love its appearances in "Savannah, Sleepless":

   Billiard balls stand expectantly,
   in their round way

or

   The singer is explaining she doesn't want
   to set the world on fire,
   she just wants to start a flame in the heart
   of some unspecified "you."

I especially admire the marriage of Tillinghast's aesthetic style and his now disturbingly dead-pan plain style in "Xiphias."It's an unsettling, deliberately cryptic love poem, in which an early discovery of the speaker's own capacity for violent passion as well as disillusionment—

I wouldn't have cared if I had driven the Fiat
Off the cliff, so long as we went over together.
You were twenty-two then.
Signorina,in the South of Italy,
and I wished I had packed a gun.

—is mirrored in a fishing scene:

The harpoonist struck.
The three-yard pine shaft blew out for itself a tunnel
Of bubbles and disturbance.
And the blade that fisherman call a "lily"
Jabbed in just behind the gills.

When the poem comes to rest with

That fish was lucky. He died then and there.
Pesce spada In Italian.

one feels the second line is perhaps the only one that could have rescued the first from sentimentality; learning, this time, standing for the whole dimension of aesthetic resonance the maturer speaker could not have acquired without strong feeling, and pain.    The countercultural Tillinghast is somehow still alive in this book's "peregrinating" hero, imperturbable, light-spirited witness of places and cultures. Yet I also relish the moments of deliberate political incorrectness: the unjudgmental portrait of Southern sharecroppers and their employers in "Allen's Sataion: They"; the fondness for a "tweedy, imaginary / Companion. . . . composite / Of my more avuncular professor at Harvard" in "An Elegist's Tour of Dublin"; or this tribute to the Middle Ages—

The carver of ivory, asked to affirm the Creed-
I believe in one God, the Father Almighty,
Maker of heaven and earth. And of all things seen

And unseen-would not I think have qualified
Those words edged with snowy clarity
As you or I might: Well yes, but not what you mean
By 'God,' and not in the usual sense of 'believe,'
And not, I rather suspect, what you might have
In mind when you say 'I.'
He was a plainer man.

Tillinghast's stonecutter, then, reflects his wish, however hopeless, for that kind of existential "clarity," as well as the aesthetic kind.

I wouldn't want to end without mentioning others of my favorite poems here: the bravura historical improvisations "Manhattan, Deconstructing" and "A History of Windows"; the understated and touching love poems "The Adirondack"; the many poems set in Ireland; the unexpectedly grim "Convergence," Tillinghast's middle works, The Knife and "Sewanee in Ruins," are irreplaceable documents in the cultural history of our time; but this is the first book that quite fulfills the early promise of Sleep Watch as poetry. May there be many more to follow!

Alan Williamson's brand new book of poetry, from the University of Chicago, is Love and the Soul. He also is the author of The Muse of Distance and Eloquence and Mere Life: Essays on the Art of Poetry, among other books. He is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis.

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