It gives me great pleasure to review this book by a poet who was my student many years ago. When that student's seventh volume of poetry surpasses his teacher's most generous expectations, the pleasure is exponential.
This newest volume in an ever more distinguished oeuvre establishes beyond any doubt that Rosen is a master, albeit one who flourishes outside the mainstream of current poetic taste as exemplified by academic poets like Jorie Graham, Robert Pinsky, or Paul Muldoon. Possessed of a unique and inventive mind, Rosen's poetry is unlike any being written in America at the present time. That is not to say that he is without accomplices. James Dickey comes immediately to mind, as does Philip Levine. Where Rosen augments Dickey's anger with a sly humor, he demonstrates a breadth of concerns that cover an even wider geography than Levine. Rosen's sinewy cadences also owe a debt to Louis Macneice. But that being said, his genuine authority and status as an important contemporary poet in the great tradition of Whitman, is in no way diminished. Rosen, the poet, is equally alive in numerous personae: lover; celebrant of nature; disappointed idealist; angry citizen of the world; the mendicant who seeks a portion of truth; the re-inventor of myths that are able to illuminate his immediate concerns— and the irreverent witness who saves his sanity with Olympian laughter in a world gone awry. Here are some stunning examples:
A band of friends, dogs, dim-witted
And murderous, who in glad frenzy believed I was a
Stag. But I was Actaeon.
It was the forest. I saw you naked and I was lost.
(Thinking Of Kissing You)
or,
Snow in a state of surrender,
Melting into rivers and bottomless mud,
Evaporating through its crust.
Something had to happen. A deer has to eat.
Often the young tree dies on its feet.
(The Woods In March)
These are only two examples from the first section of this book of nearly 100 pages that demonstrate that Rosen is a poet of containment as well as being a poet of expansion. The range is immense, the diction is sure and unerring. In "The Black Forest" Rosen adumbrates the relationship between the two Schumanns, Robert and Clara, and Johannes Brahms. The title of the poem serves as an aside to the problematical relationship, whose real subject is the relationship of "the student/ Reinventing the master, the ruined Romantic" whose melancholy Rosen casts in images, "floundering like a cat hit by a car, like a carp/Flopping in a rowboat" that are at one and the same time angry and humane. One feels Rosen's tension in a language that is formal despite its appearance of laxity. Rosen's ability to generate the effect he wants, his awareness of the binary fate of art and of artists, serves him well in this as in his other poems that deal, often only obliquely, with the same subject:
The beginning of the world is the end of the earth.
The sun motionless, our pitiful planet rolling over
In its clouds of balm and its nightmares,
Wondering if it can snatch another hour,
Another minute, it doesn't matter of this delicious
Half-oblivion, life's opening to light so awful,
So irresistible.
(Chamber Music)
and Rosen's iconoclastic defense of poetry:
Try poetry. Tell us how life
Is a cruel but precious gift. Join the herd
On the hillside so closely cropped...
one poem or lover as good as
A million, and better or worse than another.
(Try Poetry)
or the awesome, "Empedocles On Etna" in which Rosen asserts a philosophy of poetry, nearly an ars poetica, when he points to:
fame that mistook
Lava for poetry, seething with issues
Instead of seizing them, as we must.
The poem ends with an affirmation about the 'facts of life." What is both challenging and courageous in these poems is the uneasy, sometimes really awkward movement of the verse. The colloquial and the formal are presented as being in a continuing struggle to get experience into focus, hand in hand with a scrupulous desire to be faithful to all the claims on Rosen's attention. That is also an insignia of the poems that deal with politics, which make up a not inconsiderable part of this volume. Rosen has a keen eye for the details of what life is like in the second half of the 20th century.
In "Sierra Leone", for instance, People have no hands—tax collectors took them. And voting regulators, with the swift drop of an axe or the serious, "Firewood", in which the pathos of poverty, hunger, starvation and life in a restricted society are tempered by a quirky humor, which increases the effect of the theme:
How do you cut down a tree in Bulgaria?
A little at a time, if illegal
Rosen demonstrates no compunction about confronting the evil that underlies much contemporary political activity, as in "Reasons for Mladic's Behavior At Srebrenica":
Evil is tone deaf and vice versa. Mladic enjoyed
Making the mothers smile by giving candybars to their kids
And promising transport for the elderly, but sooner or later
He had to get down to business in order
To have a good night's rest. Yet there's always a problem:
How do you wipe your boots if your room
Has no curtains? Evil is tone-deaf. I meant that about poetry.
Irony, the reduction of senseless killing to 'business' highlights horror of a "generation without history."
Since there is hardly a single poem in this book that is not memorable, I could quote from them without end if time and space allowed. In foregoing that pleasure, I wish to focus only on two more poems that I am convinced are indispensable for any complete judgment of Rosen as an important American contemporary. They exhibit the sense of here-ness that has been a hallmark of his poetry from the outset. In the noteworthy, "Among School Children" he presents a personal and compellingly modern view of two famous themes from Yeats, one from a poem with the same title and the second from the justly immortal "Leda And the Swan." Rosen also opens in a Catholic school, with no innuendo, rather with direct sexual images:
Breasts like unbaked loaves with unimaginable
Nipples, as clad in athletic bras—her parents
Send her to St. Michael's during the year...
and finally moves easily from the particular through the universal implications of sexuality repressed by doctrine to the perversion of sexual abuse:
Or her aroma
Of a rubbery bathtub toy? God as a swan the size
Of a powerboat could dive-bomb her from heaven
To shoot a cloud up her legs,
...so she could sense,
If not understand, sex was vicious, degrading,
Better to use her brain and stop tempting the gods,
Who wasted such luscious endowments
On a teenager.
Rosen risks the unavoidable comparison with one of the great masters of contemporary poetry. It is a risk that simultaneously demonstrates a respect for his métier, his irreverence toward man-made icons and his unflagging intention to go his own poetic way regardless of where it leads him. That he succeeds as well as he does in this volume is an indication that his long view coupled with a rejection of the cultural market which decides whose work is prized and stands up to repeated reading, may bring him the kudos he richly deserves at some time when the poets who now claim reputations for technically well-wrought but empty urns (apologies to Cleanth Brooks) will be no more than footnotes. Loosely characterized, The Origins of Tragedy may be said to be playful. This has been true of Rosen's poetry from his first volume. It is a playfulness that has enabled him to meet the world on his own terms, and to deal with its manifold materialism with a craftsmanship adapted to the dervish in him. I doubt that Rosen will be among the prize-winners for books published this year. That is not because he is undeserving but rather because the cabals which award Pulitzers, Lannans, and whatever else has been established for poets to put into their pockets or hang on their reputations, will lack the courage necessary to make a choice from beyond the confines of Harvard Yard or the Princeton Quad. I close with a quote from the memorable title poem that exemplifies Rosen's aesthetic wholeness, his nervous openness, and devotion to the way he sees things:
The chorus,
Like us is hopeless, but does its best.
Reviewed by Oswald LeWinter
