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Form is feeling in Peter Davison's Breathing Room
Poems from The Atlantic Monthly, also appearing in Breathing Room (Knopf, 2000), read aloud by Peter Davison. You (August 2000) Best Friend (August 2000) These Days (February 2000) Falling Water (February 1998) No Escape (November 1997) On Mount Timpanogos, 1935 (April 1997) Like No Other (February 1997) |
Among the many artful qualities gracing the book -- its range of occasion and wealth of perception, its ready wit and telling nuance -- is the agile nonce form that nearly all the poems take: twenty-five lines cast in seven tercets and a closing quatrain, flexing down the page in a limber sidewinding pattern reminiscent of the late poems of William Carlos Williams, albeit with a pensive rustle and verbal impress all their own. A rather constraining scaffold, one would think, but in the event the effect is quite the opposite. The poems in Breathing Room sound anything but forced, the versification channeling the pitch and reach of introspection in cadences that seem to compose themselves -- the analogy is inescapable -- as naturally as breathing. With a nod to the book's clutch of exacting nature poems, consider a verse form that in its supple alertness asks to be likened to "the lightfoot/ lope of a rapt fox/ a red and ragged vixen// absorbed in her intentions....// catlike or rather foxlike/ in concentration." Make no mistake: these lines, from Davison's "Like No Other," catch fox and poet alike entirely in their element, going about their business with a kindred intensity of purpose.
It is none too common for poets with some forty years of writing behind them to inaugurate a new manner of speaking and reckoning lyrically, and as Davison intimates in his brief foreword, "Catches of Breath," this second wind can be ascribed to inspiration in the most primal sense.
The breath is the most intimate aspect of our existence. It connects us to the biosphere. Breath makes our voice operate. It enables oxygen to penetrate our bodies. Breath lends us rhyme and meter, the means by which poetry came into existence.... Poetry began, I think, as a mnemonic device to enable an illiterate populace to remember prayers, to recite the order of worship; or, in a more secular use, to recount the inventories of warehouses in ancient Babylon. That's why we wrote in rhyme and meter, so that we could remember what we thought we had compiled; hence the connection of words to breath to sense to mind to memory to rhythm to emotion to memory.These musings call to mind Yeats's stirring line, "I made it out of a mouthful of air," and the resonances do not end there. It's a measure of Davison's aplomb in Breathing Room that these poems are not beggared by being mentioned in the same breath with those of poets noted for writing so magisterially in an autumnal mode: the Yeats of "The Circus Animals' Desertion"; the Williams of Pictures from Brueghel; and virtually all the best stuff of Thomas Hardy, composed after he retired from the fiction trade in his late fifties. Not that there is anything derivative in how Davison's poems earn their keep. The interplay of fluency and tension in his improvised measures -- their "startled and startling freedom," in the words of W. S. Merwin -- time and again creates its own specific gravity, one that finds its equilibrium in the mind's "juicy swamp of invention" and the potency of language that captures sensation "with exactly the wanted/ intensity of/ tilt."
[an error occurred while processing this directive] Indeed, one may come away persuaded that an insistence on cutting to the quick of articulate emotion is what gives this body of poetry its steadfast pulse. Davison implies as much in his poem called "Getting Over Robert Frost," in which he recalls his formative close acquaintance with that grand old lion and his later efforts at countering "All those evenings cradled in the sway" of Frost's artistic influence. "I was born entitled to/ the liberty of breathing easy," Davison continues, "but I had to learn/ the trick of not trusting a line/ unless it flickered with/ my own odor,/ the taste of myself."
To judge by the warmblooded lines that flick and dart through this collection, there seems no question but that Davison has made good on that score. Yet in another way, and just as redoubtably, Breathing Room emerges as an emblematic testament to the poetic credo Frost set down in his most celebrated piece of prose, "The Figure a Poem Makes." In this pithy 1939 essay, Frost minted some of the most talismanic aphorisms on the workings of poetry this side of Horace's "Ars Poetica." A realized poem "begins in delight and ends in wisdom." It provides "a momentary stay against confusion." Poets "stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs when they walk in the fields." "The sound is the gold in the ore." The figures Peter Davison's poems make in Breathing Room -- vivid trajectories of fused form and feeling, vibrant wavelengths of fine-tuned sound and sense -- affirm Frost's maxims on all counts. As Davison writes in the clinching quatrain of "No Escape," the poem that both begins and ends the book as if to impart the palpable action of respiration,
We attain fulfillment only if we carry
the breath of the world
without surrender
or escape.
--David Barber
Join the conversation in the Books & Literature conference of Post & Riposte.
More on poets and poetry in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly.
David Barber is Atlantic Unbound's literary editor.
Copyright © 2000 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
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