Reviews

The Opening of the Field: Poetry by Robert Duncan

octavia_cade's review against another edition

slow-paced

1.0

I could not get on with this, I really couldn't - just bounced off it entirely. A short way through it, I was reminded of Edith Sitwell's poetry, so imagine my surprise when she was name-dropped a few poems later. I like Sitwell much more, though - at least the bits of her that I've read: one of my early academic papers was on her Three Poems of the Atomic Age, which looked at the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki through Sitwell's own religious lens. The poems sort of mixed the events of the bombings with apocalyptic mythology, and they were really effective... but I think they were so effective because Sitwell limited her comparison to that very strong central metaphor.

Duncan, on the other hand... it's like a grab-bag of references from half a dozen ancient civilizations mixed with contemporary culture and a very mannered approach to the act of creating literature. There's an interminable series of poems, scattered throughout the book, called "The Structure of Rime," and they - like so many of the other poems here - are just unbearably pretentious. Consider this:

How uncertain when I said unwind the winding. Chiron,
Cross of Two Orders! Grammarian! from your side the never
healing! Undo the bindings of immutable syntax!

The eyes that are horns of the moon feast on the leaves of trampled sentences.

I'm sorry, but 90+ pages of this is too much for me to retain any sort of liking for it. There's the very odd interesting image or wordplay, but the (admittedly delightful) single verse about the "forlorn moosey-faced poem" is not enough to save this collection for me. I've read it once, and never again.