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 Shadows of Houses BY H. L. Hix Etruscan Press, $15.95 Buy this book Amazon Barnes and Noble Book Sense |
When you read a good poem you admire it; when you read a great poem, you fear it, because something of the original fire of composition has been transmitted. There are many good and admirable poems in H.L. Hix’s Shadows of Houses, and some very good, memorable, teachable poems about the mingled wonders and horrors of living in the world. But there is also a great poem in this book, “The God of Restlessness.” It is odd and sad and profound and pitch-perfect and muscular. In its synoptic sweep it recalls Piers Plowman, the Georgics, and Ammons’s Garbage—and yet its nose is so close to the earth that it feels also like a sonnet by Clare: it’s one of the best poems I have read in years.
“The God of Restlessness” is a poem about power, even infinite power (such as that wielded by gods) allied to momentary whim. You want your gods patient and focused; you want their logic to be transparent and traceable. You want restless things to be impotent, or at least to lack the power to enact their passing fancies. You get neither of your wishes in Hix. Instead you get:
Divine immanence is more often figured as benign, as in Smart or Emerson or (except for a few marked examples in the great catalogues) in Whitman. Doesn’t bounty imply blessings? But in Hix the world is overflowing with reality—and lots of it, more than half of it, is horrifying. Hix has learned from George Herbert the wages of constant, churning spiritual change, and so badly wishes to be free of this mercurial state that, like Herbert, he asks to be made inanimate:
Of course the real “god of restlessness” is consciousness itself, sharpened into discrete events by the imagination and memory and all the consequent emotions these states compel. Hix’s poem has found, of all things, a new, really ingenious way of representing the jabs and parries of thinking as it simultaneously provokes and fends off feeling. The poem’s two-hundred plus lines are all divided by caesurae with sonic continuity across formal units provided by alliteration and internal rhyme. In theory the Anglo-Saxon mannerisms should wear thin. In practice they are a perfect way to sustain the poem’s sweep (necessary to suggest the sheer largeness of its represented world) while preserving the vulnerable scale of an actual, singular mind and voice. The most remarkable thing about this poem is its moral gravity, attained somehow with a total lack of didacticism. “Moral” episodes are not ranked above or below “mere” worldly phenomena; there is scripture but no exegesis, a game going on but nobody calling the plays: . after storms sweet ozone smell The rigid caesurae (enforced by the vertical “seam” of dots running up and down every page) fracture reality into atoms. At this sub-cellular level of perception, we never know how things are, or should be, built. The atomic sameness (despite wild disparity of reference) of phrases like “red horizon that haloes” and “scars like wildflowers” deny the human story the emphasis it would ordinarily demand. The world of this poem (“Anglo-Saxon” insofar as it suggests, fancifully, a culture tested against primordial rage) hasn’t yet been sorted into appropriate and inappropriate causes for grief. You can’t do justice to this poem in a brief review; and real justice would entail describing the wonderful sonnet-sequence, “Spring,” that makes up about two-thirds of Shadows of Houses. “The beautiful/and well-fed have grounds for lament,” writes Hix. Perhaps: but very few poets have the untroubled authority to say so, and the talent to make us weep. — Dan Chiasson |
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