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Laws of GravityA poet draws subtle and erudite lessons from the rules we (sometimes) live by. By Graham Christian MARCH 30, 1998: THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, by J.D. McClatchy. Alfred A. Knopf, 104 pages, $21. Canonization, we are told, requires, in addition to evidence of an exemplary life, at least three well-attested miracles. Harold Bloom, in his famously controversial The Western Canon, elevated poet J.D. McClatchy's previous book, The Rest of the Way, to his own modern literary canon of texts. Though this gesture may seem a little premature -- even the Vatican waits until after the death of a candidate for sainthood before examining the case -- the appearance of a new volume gives us new reason to weigh the high praise that Bloom's inclusion of McClatchy implies.
The Ten Commandments, McClatchy's fourth book of poetry, is organized by the precepts of the Decalogue of Moses. There can be a certain paint-by-numbers danger in the strictness of such an approach, but we see in McClatchy's treatment that these commandments predict, and encompass, the range of human pleasures and failings. His formal skill is enviable, from the elegiac distichs of "Auden's OED" to the subtle syllabic stanzas that shape the volume's strongest poems. McClatchy's gift seems, in the maturity he evinces here, Augustan. His natural counterparts are not the Christopher Marlowe he studied in the '60s or the confessional poets he knew in the '70s but John Dryden and Alexander Pope; he has said that "the most seductive sentence in the English language isn't 'I love you' but 'I understand you,' " a notion Johnson or John Gay would have endorsed. With them he shares a belief in the control of experience and memory by the ideas and rigor of a well-stocked mind. In "Dervish," for instance, the God the dervishes celebrate in their ecstatic dances becomes a remote sovereign, more light than heat: "God/is the light of the heavens,/a niche wherein is a lamp./The lamp is in glass./The glass is a high,/brightening, constant star." The search for the truth of the heart or of the senses usually leads to bitterness, disappointment, or self-deceit in McClatchy's world; the faithless lover of "Betrayal" is likened to "the burning bush [that] might have mistaken its flowers/for flames or the rustling in its spindly branches/for the indrawn, unreliable voice of God." Even the deliciously sinful pleasures of adultery, in the beautifully crafted "Dialogue of Desire and Guilt," are curtailed and foreshortened before they begin:
Nothing helps. The cloudy consolations,McClatchy's is a cold world, its most convincing logician the Iago of "Honest Iago":
I could swear it was her handkerchief I saw.The succor McClatchy rests on at last is not the comfort of philosophy, as he proves in "Descartes' Dream," but the knowledge of the certainty of mortality:
How far must we get away from the earth to see itJohnson or Swift, with their dark piety, would have understood, though they had the additional comfort of a Christian salvation. Even in this context we should not be surprised that McClatchy is capable of the poignant disorders of "Three Dreams About Elizabeth Bishop"; Swift, too, knew the value of mad-seeming, purposeful absurdities. And the lesson McClatchy draws from dream is characteristic:
Love will leave us alone if we let it.Occasionally McClatchy's need to reason and explicate leads him into strange courses -- it is very curious to attach a four-page train of verse to a miniskirt of a six-word fragment, as he does in "Variations on Lines Cancelled by Dickinson" -- but on the whole his cool control gives rise to striking poetry; the effect is rather like that of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's urban "eclogues." The virtue of his gift, profoundly responsive in its nature, is what it can produce when deep feeling meets a received text, as in "Late Night Ode," which is drawn from a poem by Horace:
It's over, love. Look at me pushing fifty now,This, while not what Horace said, is what Horace meant; it shows us how the original ought to feel. What is astonishing about this poem is how deeply it is informed by the original -- and yet how brilliantly it makes a new poem. This poem is perhaps one of the most successful recreations of classical verse in English, and, for its witty images and rhythmic beauties, one of the best poems of the past decade; Dryden, himself a master of classical "imitations," would have been pleased with it. If this is the direction in which McClatchy's verse points now, Harold Bloom will seem to have been prophetic: perhaps it is the first of the miracles that precede the canonization. Graham Christian is a writer and independent scholar living in Somerville.
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