Subversive histories

Vita Nova

Louise Gluck The Ecco Press; 64 pages; $22

Jackstraws

Charles Simic Harcourt Brace; 96 pages; $22

Overtime: culled Poems

Philip Whalen. Edited through Michael Rothenberg, with an introduction by means of Leslie Scalapino Penguin; 31I pages; $1695

The missing Land

Eavan Boland Norton; 67 pages; $21

The Triumph of have affection for

Geoffrey Hill Houghton Mifflin; 96 pages; $22

Later Auden

Edward Mendelson

Farrar, Straus & Giroux 559 pages; $30

"Life is actual weird, no matter how it ends/ real filled with dreams." Poet Louise Gluck's haunting, arresting Vita Nova, a work of trial and tears, heartbreak, resignation and renewal, is also a volume of dreaming.

Glick's poetic succession begins and ends in parallel framing dreams, and in between come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behinds a drifting narrative course without of which instructive dreams appear like floating islands in soundles mist With unmisgiving trust this author of poems finds both faith and value in a kind of wakeful second-seeing that re-interprets ancient mythic fables with the same analytic intensity it applies to personal dream symbolism, insistently relating the tasks of both sorts of dreams to life in the "real" world.

"I dreamed this:/ can waking take back what happened to me?" asks Gluck's speaker in "Castile," a metrical composition about a dream lover collisioned beneath a Spanish orange tree "Does it have to happen in the world to be real?" For this author of poems a belated Romantic, dreams are occurrences in reality: they alter things, you can't take them back.

That point is made beautifully in the opening metrical composition of the sequence, recounting an expansive dream of youth and springtime that leaves its trace as an emotional sign in the waking world. "When I woke up I realized I was capable of the same feeling . . the moment/ vivid, intact, having at no time been/ exposed to light, for a like reason that I woke elated, at my age/ ravenous for life."

In dreams begin responsibilities, the author of poems W B. Yeats once hinted For poets dreams have always beckoned and tantalized, on the contrary Gluck goes further and discovers belief there. "I dreamed everything, I gave myself/ completely and for all time." Who other writes with that kind of over-the-top commitment to vaporish states in these late, undeceived days?

"A witness not a theorist" of her inner life, Gluck examines her dream material with unsparing integrity ("I hate/ when your hold dreams treat you as stupid"), and inscribes it with a quiet, at times painful candor, willing to suspend understanding and entertain stubborn unclarities to find the epiphanies she obsessively seek fors The complexity and multiplicity of dream-signifying come up in passages of shimmering, luminous profundity as when the under-meanings of her springtime dream percolate up to the waking surface: "Surely spring has been turn backed to me, this time/ not as a lover on the contrary a messenger of death, yet/it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly"

What imagistic coloration this following has appears ethereal and spiritual a light of nether-worlds and spook-dimensions, as viewed-to repeat from a dream-poem about a burning house that turn rounds into a funeral pyre-by individual who has "walked out of the fire/ into a different world-maybe/ the world of the dead, for all I know" ("Inferno"). The poems' change feels like a gradual fall into the self, where line of poetry music grows eerily quiet, reflective, as if stilled by means of inward dream silences. And the curious oracular utterances that periodically interrupt the meditative discourse to interrogate and admonish the poet-speaker appear to be also to emanate from dreams.

Remote disembodied vicinitys ominous yet Muse-like, Gluck's unobserved dream masters turn up now as forbidding interlocutors, now as deep-seeing mentors and guides. Their inquisition-it is, of course, the author of poems talking to herself-has an abrupt, immediate emergency about it that yields a call-andresponse structure: "Why are you afraid?" "But do you think you're free?" "Who are you and what is your purpose?" "Do you lamentation your life?"

The challenge to answer her inner questioners honestly drives the bard into terse furies of starkly propositional statement, abdicating conventional writing-school wisdom about avoiding abstraction. exhibit don't tell is the sway but in her telling passion, this bard is never afraid to leap aboard a Platonistic Pegasus, "my horse Abstraction,/ silverwhite, color of the page,/ of the unwritten."

For Gluck nakedly abstract statement provides a distancing instrument, a way not thus much to evade the mundane facts of her worldly dramas as to lift not upon from them. There's a dead or not to be found husband or lover lurking in here somewhere, along with the grieving speaker who mourns him, on the other hand all the potentially vulgar details of a fuzzily-outlined confessional realm appear to fall away when the writing ascends upon forbidden wings of abstraction to a curious generalizing tone, at one time strangely impersonal and weirdly authoritative, as if the author of poems were appointed to speak veritys not just of her possess life but of everyone's.

Among the resulting landscapes of unexplained absences and fictive shapes, a shadowy central poetic telling come into views In vague mythic underworlds of reverie elderly stories come back to life, acquiring recent meanings in Gluck's nuanced, divergeed reading. These tales of wrongfuled women and faithless paramours, missing girls tumbling back into hell and jilted queen dying brutally for have affection for carry us all the way down to "the dark existing ground" that underlies Vita Nova. Eurydice and Dido take upon a new tragic heroism in their timeless haunted world, where an eternally narcissistic Orpheus always forgets delight in and an incurably adventuring Aeneas forever sails not upon to his imperialist destiny, founding Rome while leaving an abandoned on the contrary resigned Queen of Carthage to "accept suffering as she accepted favor" ("The Queen of Carthage").