Measure for measure
The Collected Poems, 1956-1998
By Zbigniew Herbert
Translated, from the Polish, and edited by Alissa Valles
Ecco, 600 pp., $34.95
The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975-2005
University of California, 662 pp., $49.95
Selected Poems
By Derek WalcottEdited by Edward Baugh
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 307 pp., $25
When Ben Jonson broke new ground in 1616 by publishing a folio of his collected poems and plays under the lofty title of "Works," it was a bold gambit, and not everyone was duly impressed. "Pray tell me, Ben," one wag quipped, "where doth the mystery lurk, what others call a play you call a work." Times have changed, but not all that much. These days it's standard protocol for poets of a certain age and stature to bring out a retrospective "Selected" or "Collected," yet the rites and practices of the custom are seldom as neat and tidy as those generic rubrics might suggest, and mysteries still abide. It's getting to where you practically need a field guide to keep tabs on all the eclectic offerings that fall under one heading or the other, be they valedictory treasuries that aspire to outlast gilded monuments or weighty tomes that merely serve as ceremonious career milestones.
A standout in this season's crop is Zbigniew Herbert's "Collected Poems," a strapping posthumous compendium that for the first time places all the essential work of this indispensable modern poet in the hands of English-speaking readers. It's an edition that's long overdue: Herbert (1924- 98 ) was a major literary figure in his native Poland dating back to his debut publication during the short - lived cultural thaw of the Khrushchev regime, but his international repute has been somewhat eclipsed of late by the star power of the two other redoubtable Polish poets of his generation, the Nobel laureates Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska .
Principally translated by Alissa Valles, the book chronologically assembles Herbert's nine full-length collections of slyly gnomic, coolly ferocious poetry, a body of work that made him a beacon of Poland's samizdat press and the scourge of the country's autocratic overlords. Even making the obligatory allowances for the vexations of translation, Herbert's penchant for freighting oblique irony with unswerving moral authority is readily evident -- his spartan rhetoric and hard - bitten wit provide the perfect cover for an imagination bent on conducting an underground resistance campaign against what Milosz famously called "the captive mind."
Those new to Herbert might do well to dive into his disarming series of "Mr Cogito" poems, dating from 1974 onward, the quixotic ruminations of a prickly alter ego who broods over existential paradoxes with studious melancholy: "Mr Cogito's imagination / moves like a pendulum // it runs with great precision / from suffering to suffering // there is no place in it / for poetry's artificial fires // he wants to be true / to uncertain clarity" ("Mr Cogito and the Imagination"). Torments of the spirit and the flesh may have been the great theme that Herbert's life and times thrust upon him, yet the mordant aplomb of his crafty fables and parables survives on these pages with a redemptive conviction, steelier than the stuff that iron curtains are made of.
Among the tribe of postwar American poets who rebelled against the vatic high modernism of T. S. Eliot by pledging allegiance to the unadorned free verse in "open forms" pioneered by Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, the late Robert Creeley (1926-2005 ) arguably possessed the shrewdest sense of measure and the surest feel for exacting verbal economy. His newly released "Collected Poems, 1975-2005," which together with its reissued 1982 companion volume containing the first 30 years of his work runs to more than 1,300 pages, amply testifies to just how much mileage Creeley got out of his spare diction and narrow-gauge lines. With its severely fractured syntax and delicately scored speech cadences, his radically stripped-down prosody may have smacked of an ascetic discipline, but it was the furthest possible thing from a vow of silence.
Born in Arlington and educated at Harvard, Creeley fell under the spell of Williams early on and never looked back, dedicating himself to a minimalist poetics of distilled perception and forensic introspection that in time saw him lionized as a pillar of the literary counterculture. But did it come at the price of exhausting the expressive possibilities of such a bare-bones notational style? So it would appear: Much of the later poetry reads like dutiful diary entries or fitful bouts of mental calisthenics, lacking the pensive immediacy and magisterial austerity of touchstone collections like "For Love" (1962) and "Words" (1967) . Still, the twin peaks of his collected works leave no doubt that Creeley's 60 years of forging a singularly concentrated mode of sound and sense opened up new lyric territory for the American vernacular, a starkly haunting interior where few others have had the will or wherewithal to venture.
If Creeley's poetry marks a decisive break with the metrical trappings of English verse, Derek Walcott's represents something akin to a resounding evolutionary leap. Born on the British colonial island of St. Lucia in 1930, Walcott made it his mission to take full possession of the imperial mother tongue and make it sing in a newfound key, transforming his "sound colonial education" into an unparalleled epic vision of Caribbean history and polyglot ancestry, and writing with an orphic sonority and bardic bravura seldom heard in Anglophone poetry since Dylan Thomas or Yeats.
The magnitude of Walcott's achievement as the preeminent voice of what Pico Iyer has heralded as "Tropical Classical" literature is on lavish display in his updated "Selected Poems," which spans a half-century of his protean output and highlights the formal prowess of the progressively ambitious work he's produced over the last 20 years. The volume is edited by the Jamaican poet and critic Edward Baugh, and his task is an unenviable one: Walcott's poetry asks to be read as an unfolding odyssey of personal and historical revelation on a grand scale, and the panoramic narrative poems of his late career such as "The Bounty," "The Prodigal," and the majestic Homeric palimpsest "Omeros" (which propelled him to the 1992 Nobel Prize) are scarcely amenable to excerpting. Yet taken as a kind of symphonic overture to an as-yet-unfinished canon of prodigious scope and gravity, it's a survey that ably serves its purpose -- confirming the incantatory powers of an oracle the likes of which the New World hasn't seen since Prospero drowned his book.
