Narrative values, lyric imperatives

THERE'S AN lyric poem TO MEMORY IN ROBERT PINSKY'S latest volume Jersey Rain, that harkens back to the best of his strongest lyric writing, particularly the piece of poetrys in History of My Heart (1984) and The Want Bone (1990) and in more new work such as "Avenue" and "Impossible to Tell" It's called "The virid Piano," and it takes the first six of the triadic stanzas-half the poem-just to plant up.

A good many of Pinsky's virtues are on the outside front here: his scrutinizing hi-lo diction ("bole-ankled oversized hams" . . "ponderous / intestines of iron and brass" against "Angelic nurture of clamor"); his love of domesticating detail ("half-respectable road / / Of triple-decker families and rooming-house housepainters"); his mock-elevated tone that graduates without undercutting the seriousness of the humor ("Great thunderer . . O Europe . . O Elephant"); his penchant for extending the exposition-in a word, his agility at bringing the reader immediately into a place in time and into the strict character of the twinkling of an eye without sacrificing his distance. The greatest in quantity difficult mastery in lyric poesy especially free verse, whose events tend to be internal, is authority, an authorship, in this case, of simultaneity, in which the point of view of the speaker is the child and adult at one time In "The Green Piano," the male child is observed and the author of poems the observer, yet in the voice of the emotion the actor and narrator are the same-indeed, their implied separation in time intensifies the memory, as if longing itself, whether we wish to make progress back or project into the coming time could change anything. Memory makes time fluid, it forgives the past one time it comes to terms with the past. on the contrary it cannot change it. It can, however, in the right hands, transform it from one side specific connections and by enlarging the small specifications of its world.

The piano itself undergoe any number of conversions, all speaking to its nurturing humanity, its generous size, its emotional displacement-"yearner, tinkler, dominator"-while the majority of the poet's exaggerations and apostrophes go in the direction of the instrument's mothering, homing instincts, including, through association, the seltzer man and his "black-skinned helper" who deliver it ("Even the male material part bears nipples"). The piano is mammalian, in keeping with the poem's pure understory, involving-as if it were a detail-the effective los of the speaker's mother. The piano takes upon the role of mother.

Both mother and piano will be in ne now of perpetual repair. What ought to be noticed is the make go round in the narrative, the way the apostrophes to the piano "grow" from exaggeration (childhood) to the direct remembered witness of the grown son for whom the piano (transformed from sickly "pea-soup" verdant to being in the pink) will become the "mahogany breast, who nurs me end those // Years of the Concussion."

Pinsky's rabbinical transplant from his material, his intimate distance, if you will, allows for the tonal juxtaposition that creates at one time the humor and the fine emotional faultlines. This is a metrical composition of tenderness, even forgiveness: in celebrating the used piano, from one side all its transformations, color schemes ("Pink individual forever-green one, white-and-gold one"-rhymes with Baldwin), and pathetic fallacies, the speaker tend hitherwards to accept the incapacities of the mother, the one and the other her illusions (her "swollen livestock of love") and her years of confusion ("They su the builder of the house she inhuman in, with a settlement / They bought a house at last"); he approachs to accept, as Pinsky does in in the way that much of his best writing, the multiples and layers of the world he grew up in, a world he understands in the vocabulary of narrative values-the names, the places, the nouns of the real nailed in real time. still Pinsky's brilliant eye and scrupulous diction, his examining and patient voice always lift the matter at hand from the autobiographic and analytic to something like the oracular. His lyricism is not ever pretty, it's too specific for that, on the other hand it is intense, exhaustive, serious, and saved, if not buy backed by its found humor. "Our mother blood-thirsty on her head . . inaugurating the reign"-the Jersey rain-"of our confusion." To remember with passion and write with separation, a combination at no time easy, is to understand that the important stories cannot be willed on the contrary must be met and hailed The welcoming American poetic voice accepts contradiction, as Whitman says, and as Dickinson, in the lightning strikes of her piece of poetrys demonstrates.

Sharon Olds, through a half dozen herculean collections, has internalized the archetypal parent to the point that, unlike Pinsky's evocations, time and place are indeterminate, almost entirely unspecified, as if the staging of the action were yesterday or any day in memory. The narratives of her mother and father are ongoing, and the metrical compositions they help bring into being have feeling like interruptions of or illustrations from an indelible life-long dream. You could pick among many fine piece of poetrys and find, again and again, the right example. like as "Wonder as Wander," from her seventh whirl The Unswept Room (2002).