MAXINE KUMIN
Bringing Together: Uncollected Early Poems 1958–88
Norton £9.99

D. NURKSE
Burnt Island
Knopf £12.99

CLAIRE MALROUX
Translated by MARILYN HACKER
Birds and Bison
Sheep Meadow Press £12.99

Ignorance is not bliss — if it were we would be overflowing with happiness. The two American and one French poet under review will be known to very few readers in Britain though all three are more than substantial writers. More indeed: Maxine Kumin and D. Nurkse are not just major figures in the dry literary history sense but exciting writers, and as for Claire Malroux, who is missing from Stephen Romer’s Faber anthology of Twentieth Century French Poems, she represents a kind of lyrical abstraction we tend to miss and ought to know better.

I myself was one of the ignorant, but if a volume described as ‘uncollected early poems’ can be as good as Maxine Kumin’s Bringing Together is then I have a great deal to look forward to. Kumin’s 15 books of poetry have won practically every distinction available in America, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Since the mid-70s she has lived a mostly rural life on a New Hampshire farm breeding horses and, as one of her reviewers, Joyce Carol Oates, has pointed out there is something of Thoreau about her concentration on and familiarity with nature, although, says Oates, she ‘gives us a sharp-edged, unflinching and occasionally nightmarish subjectivity exasperatingly absent in Thoreau.’

Kumin, in other words, is a far from simple poet. Of Jewish background, she was educated at a Catholic school and became a friend of Anne Sexton’s, emerging as a poet at much the same time as Sexton and Plath did, but working in a quite unlike manner, through form and restraint.

The observant richesse of the animal poems with which the book begins is clear yet densely layered, entirely without folksiness, full of knowledge and a core-to-surface understanding of the processes that result in creatures, events and phenomena. Natural processes are seen in a broad human context, so that they become part of the paraphernalia of the human world, so that, for instance, the singing birds, or ‘peepers’ as the title of one poem has it, are ‘perpetual singing machines stoned on seeds of hemp’, and new born horses, in ‘Strut’ are hailed: ‘Here come the marbleized rat-wet new foals / blowing blue bubbles like divers into air."

The creatures inhabit worlds of wit, enactment and verbal felicity, but the wit is dark and mordant. So ‘downspouts’ in one poem have become ‘doomspouts’ by the end, and ironies keep popping up, with birds ‘wrangling like clerks in adjoining bureaus’, a normal Frostian plain speaking establishing that which Marianne Mooreish irony, elegance and aestheticism destabilizes. The tension is a symptom of an existence that, despite its apparently narrow, family-and-farmyard compass, is not much at ease anywhere.

‘Each of us whimpers his way through the forest alone’ says her poem ‘In the Upper Pasture’, and this consciousness never leaves us, sounding its hollow booming bottom line in all the poems. The voices of Frost, Moore, Elizabeth Bishop and even John Crowe Ransom lurk under the surface like hidden streams forcing their way occasionally to the surface with the fine refreshing shock of the familiar, in terms of a culture that understands tragedy, but perceives it as a form.

The narratives are in any case mostly crystalline. The voice sets out to tell us something straight and there is little doubt of what that is or seems to be, but as it goes along we become aware of how subtly it weaves in suggestions and echoes, enjoying, as all good poems do, the highest form of irony, the quirky sideways joke of language. There is irony and grace everywhere. One group of poems, ostensibly about water but as much about marriage and social ties, begins with ‘Breakthrough: Nonesuch Pond’:

This foreign land is where we swim in summer.
Three days and nights of freeze have caught it flat
so that the underbelly shows. A swimmer
hardly sees these fingerlings, or what
the bottom current twitches so that now
they look like fish among the magicked plants
fastened in layers of glass…

The first two lines seem to promise regular pentameters, but by the third the rhythm has begun to float on its own found strokes and the half-rhyme hovers briefly before taking off on a long sentence. The ‘fingerlings’, or fry, raise the diction stakes, which are further raised in ‘twitches’, so slowly an apparently conventional poem has begun to mark out a broader territory, and by the time we reach the last line: ‘Nights enough will bring the peepers out’ we read the pond on several levels, like a series of metaphors dropping into the depths. And that’s the sense of the whole book: the senses working on intelligence and instinct through language, moving through depth after depth.

Like Kumin, D. Nurkse has received high praise, from Craig Raine particularly. Like Kumin, he is a pellucid narrator, but works through free verse, a little in the manner of the later Louis Simpson, though Nurkse’s narratives are less about community and more about a sense of threatened nature and threatened intimacy.

In ‘A Walk in Giovanna’s Park’ he is with someone he loves and watches children who are ‘no bigger than children’ under an immense elm. There they play ‘with darkness / as if it were clay, // and they’ve made two small gods / who cannot leave each other.’ The slip over into the transforming image is natural yet startling, and a poem that might have been sentimental (‘Don’t you know that lovers / like to imagine eternity’) moves beyond platitude into a more intense dimension. He resembles Billy Collins in this respect, a darker slightly less populist Collins, but with the same ability to pull free of the tug of the easy line.

And he needs to pull well clear in a group of poems about 9/11. Being a New Yorker, born in Brooklyn, Nurkse can get a grip on this most charged of subjects. The Brooklyn background is dropped into the very first poem of the book, in the second line of ‘Hat’, a short poem worth quoting in full, part of a sequence about childhood titled ‘My Father’s Closet’.

As soon as I put it on
Brooklyn went dark,
but when I took it off
my wooden horse stared at me
with dazzling glass eyes.

That dazzled feeling is what sees him through poems like ‘The Evacuation Corridor’ where, ‘A voice behind me shouted hurry / and another screamed mercy.’ Or ‘Ruth’ about a photograph of one of the victims posted on the wall to which he returns to find the photograph faded:

a cloud with a smudge
where I had seen hair,
the pearly necklace
a string of blobs

The group of 9/11 poems manages to speak of human loss in terms without recourse to rhetoric or special pleading. The Brooklyn child’s eye has nothing in particular to say about the events: what he says is simply what he sees, but he sees intensely.

There is a necessarily melancholy element involved in this because the poet isn’t a child. Nurkse is in fact more of a political being than most, having written widely on human rights, but the poems are not directly part of the political ring. There is nothing here relating specifically to political issues except in the environmental sense, as in ‘The Granite Coast’ where he says, ‘We wage war on ourselves / and drift through our armor / like cloud shadow.’ But even here the world of natural phenomena, that feeling of what MacNeice called ‘the drunkenness of things being various’ is related to states of consciousness, to the condition of uncertain belonging in the world.

It is this line of uncertainty that Nurkse walks in his finest poems when suddenly the floor disappears under our feet, and there is only the line with nothing either side; where, as in ‘The Dark Universe’

The universe is growing vaster and darker,
wives are no longer visible,
the little wheels of the can opener
have grown blunt and turn on themselves,
Aldebaran and Vega still blaze in the depths
but they are just words.

‘Wheels’, ‘can’ and even that narrow defeated word ‘wives’ are also just words. The danger for the poem lies in the one word ‘little’ here: it is the danger of sentimentality. The danger beneath the poem is greater though: that is what makes it a poem.

The poems of Claire Malroux, beautifully translated here by the splendid Marilyn Hacker, feel like breathing across cracked glass. There is no firm narrative in Malroux because, as Hacker points out in her introduction, there is rarely a narrative or lyric ‘I’ to respond to experience as narrative. Hacker draws our attention to Malroux’s own prowess as the prize-winning translator of Wallace Stevens, C.K. Williams, Emily Brontë, Derek Walcott and Emily Dickinson, but picks out Dickinson as the particularly kindred spirit.

If Nurkse’s poems refer primarily to states of consciousness, Malroux’s are the direct product of states of consciousness. This makes for delicately gauged reading. Malroux allows the line to serve as its own punctuation, not putting periods or commas at the ends of them even when we would expect them, but often capitalizing the beginning of each line and punctuating within the line, so that the notion of the sentence is suspended while the ghosts of clauses continue to circulate and drift in ambiguous space. None of the poems is long, and a short poem like ‘Storm’ might demonstrate the breath and glass quality:

A bird the color of almost-dawn poised
But floating spectrally above an emptiness
In the whiter emptiness of summer, beyond
This river, this city nonetheless familiar
The train-cars grip the curve as if
They would be uncoupled at the very moment
They ran into the ruins of a deserted
Town, Resafa with its gypsum ramparts….

The light abstractions (almost, spectrally, emptiness, emptiness) of the first four lines form something like a sentence, but the syntax moves on to the train-cars that grip the curve, shifting us from the bird to the train almost without warning, leaving us to grip some kind of curve ourselves. The poem serves as an epiphany about the nature of the poetic.

Some of these poems could easily float away but don’t, for while their progress is associative rather than anecdotal, they perform the stabilizing narrative arc in their own way. That which might have been self-conscious and precious (faults the Anglo-Saxon sensibility tends to ascribe to the Gallic) remains concrete in much the same way as Dickinson does, through surprising shifts that keep the senses sharp.

The creatures and places in Maxine Kumin’s poetry are all experienced as fully empirical, real and independent of the observer. Malroux’s sensibility reflects the world as sensibility, but does not talk about itself as an object. Perhaps what we are reading here is a sample of the often mentioned, but rarely embodied, ecriture feminine, that ability to deobjectify the world so that sensibility and world are one.

It might be, but the poems do not ask to be read as a theoretical proposition. There are events and predicaments out there. ‘Because it’s Monday man takes up his tasks again / he pries the scales from his brain one by one / The dark parts are uncovered / Patches of mildew shiver in the daylight’, begins an untitled poem (most of the poems are untitled in French though Hacker gives them titles sometimes) dated only ‘February 3, morning and evening’, and ends with a rubbish dump and the birds soaring above it with disdain ‘they, to cross the sea / need only grow new wing-feathers’.

Any inclination to turn into theory and mirrors is negated by the growth of those new wing-feathers and the presence of the rubbish dump. Malroux’s is a deeply human place after all. The cracked and splintered glass sees to that. The translations are opposite the originals, mostly straightforward since Malroux’s ambiguities are rarely a matter of lexicography or localized effect. (There are exceptions of course ‘“Échec et mats” Ces mots comme un soupir’ is probably more like a sigh than ‘Check and mate’ are, but the task here is hopeless.)

Helene Cixous says something somewhere about having urgently to regain the entrance, the breath, to keep the trace. The point is that the sensibility works in English, in tough old gum-and-spit, oak-and-groin, and abstraction-breath-cloudresistant Anglo-Saxon.

George Szirtes is a Hungarian-born poet, editor and translator. He has written a dozen books of poetry of which the most recent, Reel (Bloodaxe) was the winner of the 2004 TS Eliot Prize. His translation of Sándor Márai's Conversations in Bolzano appeared last November.

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