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Fitting Vision to the Dark
FLIGHT AMONG THE ToMBs. By Anthony Hecht. Alfred Knopf. $23.00
DESERT FATHERS, URANIUM DAUGHTERS. By Debora Greger. Penguin. $14.95
DESIRE. By Frank Bidart. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $20.00
Each of these poets fashions forms of extremity and forms of candor. The forms are often hard-won; poets have to steal back for themselves even what's given them by the world. Yet the work keeps the power of surprise. One senses in these poems, so filled with the dead, "the quickened surface of the page."
The title of Anthony Hecht's Flight Among the Tombs might herald a book of elegies. Its second half does offer spare, eloquent poems of mourning for James Merrill and Joseph Brodsky. But the breathtaking sequence that dominates the book, "The Presumptions of Death," has little typically elegiac about it. It is ferociously about life rather than death. It is about the postures of death in life, voices of death that cannot be killed. The scrupulous rage and inventiveness of Hecht's making display themselves in all of their force here.
Death speaks in each poem from behind a mask. In the early poems of the sequence, it assumes a style suited to a sly satirist of human vanity"Death the Hypocrite," "Death Demure," or "Death Sauntering About," watching the living while we discuss "questions of form, the inscrutable ways of chance, / As edges of shadow harden." But the idea of death as a mute, mocking limit to human life gives way to something much more unsettling. The disguises of death compose a Grand Guignol on the shapes of human will; they speak to the deathly life of our living appetites and desires. Death shows itself as a spirit wound up within our postures of knowledge, our forms of inquiry, making, and mocking. It inhabits our sympathy as much as our hatred; it creeps into our irony, our self-doubt, and our wonder. Hecht's dense, eerie shifts of tone are intended to train our ears: in the elisions and oversights of these speakers-Death the Judge, Death the Archbishop, Death the Knight, Death the Oxford Don, Death the Mexican Revolutionary-one feels not merely the vanity but the bitter intelligence, the self-wounding rage, and the cruelty that can haunt our work, our...