Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2865279 in Books
• Published on: 1991-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 180 pages

From The Washington Post

By Mary Karr

Allen Grossman's poetry is tethered to an antiquity that he both honors and subverts. His pastoral poems, for instance, fly in the face of the form's historic purpose first set out by Theocritus in Idylls and followed by Virgil in Ecologues. For them, pastoral portraits of rustic shepherd life celebrated a lost and golden age. Grossman's vision is darker: "At that time the sheep called to him/ From their wormy bellies, as they/ Lay bloating in the field. He was/ A pastoralist." Grossman's grand and bardic style echoes the High Modernist capital-T Tradition that bred both Yeats and Eliot (about whom Grossman has written). He leavens his work with the hilarity of honky tonk and the Borscht Belt. "The Piano Player Explains Himself" is an ars poetica, in which the piano is an actual Messiah -- as poetry is, I think, when it's played right.

When the corpse revived at the funeral,

The outraged mourners killed it; and the soul

Of the revenant passed into the body

Of the poet because it had more to say.

He sat down at the piano no one could play

Called Messiah or The Regulator of the World. . . .

Grossman's lyric strategies sometimes involve repeating themes with the biblical-sounding circularity of Eliot's "Four Quartets" (themselves inspired by Beethoven's late quartets): "We shall not cease from exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time."

In "The Work" Grossman sets out his purpose on the planet: to love, which for Grossman also involves writing:

A great light is the man who knows the woman he loves

A great light is the woman who knows the man she loves

And carries the light into room after room arousing

The sleepers and looking hard into the face of each

And then sends them asleep again with a kiss

Or a whole night of love

and goes on and on until

The man and woman who carry the great lights of the

Knowledge of the one lover enter the room

toward which

Their light is sent and fit the one and the other torch

In a high candelabrum and there is such light

That children leap up

unless the sea swallow them

In the crossing or hatred or war against which do not

Pray only but be vigilant and set your hand to the work.

Grossman's lighting of the candelabrum is meant to arouse the sleepers, inciting us to awaken into love. Amid the sweetness of children leaping up, he cautions us to be vigilant against evil, not only to pray but to act. I'd like to crown him one of our great Low Moderns; he's Wallace Stevens with stronger stories to anchor lame minds such as my own; he's Eliot without footnotes. Like all great poets, he faithfully serves both word and world -- and us.

(Allen Grossman's "A Pastoral," "The Piano Player Explains Himself" and "The Work" are from "The Ether Dome and Other Poems: New and Selected (1979-1991)," New Directions, 1991. © 1991 by Allen Grossman.)

Mary Karr has published four books of poems, most recently

"Sinners Welcome."

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

The Battered Sage
Grossman's poems are rife with ancient brutality and human endurance. There is a mythology at work beneath the raw and violent surface of these humane poems. Grossman indulges and relishes in the ability of the battered spirit to prevail by way of that ancient precept long forgotten by the water-downed souls of the modern world: primal courage. Grossman has pulled back the Ulyssean bow and let loose the avenging arrow upon the lackluster suitors of the modern world. Grossman's poems possess the same quiet rage and humble disguise as Ulysses' return to Ithaca as a beggar. There is a Quixotic spirit here, but the hard blows of life are evident, and these hardships, these pains, form the hard-willed inspiration of Grossman's language. The language coupled with Grossman's inability to surrender to the forces of life produces the genius of Grossman's poetry. As a former student of his at Hopkins, I can only say that he is as great a teacher as he is a poet. Although any student of his must beware of those Achillean ash spears that he hurls when he gets fired up during lectures.

Just one poem
Mary Karr chose Allen Grossman for today's (July 27,2008) poetry column in the Washington Post Book World.
"The Piano Player Explains Himself" and "The Work" are from The Ether Dome. I had never heard of Grossman, but am a scattered reader of poetry. "The Work" woke me up this Sunday morning. A great awakening--written in 1991 (or earlier), urgently fitting today.

A poet's poet
Grossman has often been called a poet's poet, and one of the things that means is that he's very hard to read, very hard to get into, basically difficult. But get over the hurdle, and this is one of the most profound and illuminating books you'll ever read. A ten is an insult. This book deserves a 20, and easily. I read this book in jaw dropped awe.

But if you're not up for it, you might as well go for some Charles Simic. :-)