A simple introductory contrast between these poets: Amy Clampitt, the older woman, was brought up in Iowa; Jorie Graham grew up in Italy. Amy Clampitt begins and sustains The Kingfisher as a rhapsodist (in its root meaning of one who stitches together) but she’s apparently turning to poetry drawn directly out of parent/childhood experience which is serious and therefore seeks a plainer, higher style than her descriptive poems. When she retains the writing habits of the rhapsodist, this turn isn’t easy for Miss Clampitt. 

It’s easy to take pleasure in her lyric descriptions. Lines packed with gorgeous sounds, language, images, seem to rush or tumble forward in continuous movement. “The Cove,” the first poem in the book, begins this way: “Inside the snug house, blue willoware/plates go round the dado, cross-stitch/domesticates the guest room … . ‘” Things activate, and they override point of view. They multiply by proliferating analogies, references to each other, movement. “The Cove” ends: 
 

a curtain wall just frescoed
indigo, so immense a hue, a blue
of such majesty it can’t be looked at, 
at whose apex there pulses, even
in daylight, a lighthouse, light-
pierced like a needle’s eye.

Light and eye are there, but you can see how point of view disappears—indeed, the blue “can’t be looked at.” The ending knots the threads of the beginning: snug house and stitch are tied to light-house and needle. Light-pierced expresses the ecstasy even as it puts out the point of view.

My pleasure in these poems was qualified partly by their “half-metaphors,” images that sound like metaphor, but are only half true and therefore not fused in metaphor’s truth. Here’s an example from a poem in which sea corridors are scrubbed “twice daily by the indefatigible tidal head nurse.” The scrubbing may be true of tides but certainly not of head nurses. The “hum” of such poems (indefatigible tidal) probably diverts the poet and keeps her from noticing inaccuracies. The hum (a “motive force …all noise”) doubtless leads her also into that modern poetry mannerism Frye calls the abstract-of-concrete or the concrete-of-abstract. There are lots of these: “theology of wax,” “reprieve of nightmare,” “dim tropisms of avoidance.”

Then this disturbed me: certain celebrations imperfectly identified. In “Salvage” a bag-laden scavenger is said to be “disencumbered/of a greater incubus,/ the crush of unexamined attitudes,” and in mining our refuse she’s said to be “re-establishing… the pleasures of the ruined.” I don’t think so. I recall the women I see on Seventh Avenue, the soles of whose feet are blacker if not colder than the sidewalk they recline on.

The best big poems of the book, “Beethoven, Opus 111” and “Imago,” get closer to high style, which in English is the plain style of something like the Sermon on the Mount. With this language “Imago” brings together its landscapes, their layers of past times, with personal history. Early settlers moved on to California, leaving a “headstone

for the infant daughter, aged two

days,

no name, they also left behind.

This infant daughter, buried, no name, suggests the child emerging in the next stanza, who feels so out of her element that she identifies herself with Anderson’s mermaid. Together the images say the impossibility of surviving without metamorphosis. By the end of the poem, on prayer-meeting night, the water clock of time “distils its drop: a luna moth, the emblem/of the born-again… “(unlike the “infant daughter”). Imago

of unfathomable evolvings, living
only to copulate and drop its litter,
does it know what it is, what it has
been,
what it may or must become?

The image of the beautiful moth fuses with plain questions in which the verb to be evolves to may and must, an evolution that the choice of such an emblem implies.

In Jorie Graham’s Erosion a voice is speaking, an”I,” but not about itself, though its experiences are the materials of the poems. The ” I ” sees to think or thinks to see—it is mind-seeing and sight-minding. “San Sepolcro,” the first poem, begins, “In this blue light/I can take you there” and continues, “This/is my house,/ 

my section of Etruscan
wall, my neighbor’s
lemon trees, and, just below
the lower church,
the airplane factory. 

The simplest language and a slow, steady movement. Here’s how it ends: “How clean/the mind is,

holy grave. It is this girl
     by Piero
della Francesca, unbuttoning
     her blue dress,
her mantle of weather,
to go into

labor. Come, we can go in.
     it is before
the birth of god. No-one
     has risen yet
to the museums, to the assembly
line—bodies
and wings—to the open air
     market. This is 
what the living do: go in.
     It’s a long way.
And the dress keeps opening
     from eternity

to privacy, quickening.
     Inside, at the heart,
is tragedy, the present moment
     forever stillborn,
but going in, each breath
     is a button

coming undone, something terribly
     nimble-fingered
finding all of the stops.

“Holy grave” is a translation of “San Sepolcro,” of course, a small town and the home of Piero and, for a few years, of his Madonna del Parto. But the mind is wholly grave as well. 

The clean language makes metaphor out of its simple steps forward that leave nothing behind. Labor goes between factory and stillborn. Airplane gives us bodies and wings (but no one is risen yet and then yields to open air. Air, with the help of heart, gives us breath. Quickening with its suggestion of life beginning, runs into still, which readies us for the terrible part of nimble. Fingered brings back the focus of the painting.

The opening action of the poem at first invites us in. We are the living, and the living go in. It opens “to privacy,” which we at first think is where we are going (we have begun with “unbuttoning”). But then we realize that the governing point of view of the poem is situated within, “at the heart.” Privacy is what we are leaving as we move toward eternity, tragedy. This is not inviting; we try the poem again. Surely opening suggests being born, we think, and that is to come out, into the open air. Yes. To live is to be mantled in “weather,” the “blue dress” of this earth, to breathe—and each breath is a button coming undone. The commonness of the words undoes us. A girl with a mantle of weather is not common, of course, but Miss Graham understands and renders in this way the monumental stillness of Piero. Fingered and stops may suggest an instrument like an organ, but honestly enough, there’s no suggestion of music.

Erosion contains thirty three poems of this extraordinary quality. I reread them as slowly as they could bear it to find the rhythm of the voice that generated them: it is a slow, steady stepping forward. But I had to catch my breath by the end of poems because images seem to take a quantum leap—from seed to Eden in a step. But there are no gaps, no unearned garden, no garment put on that the poem hasn’t materialized, patterned, cut, and sewn: “Bruna is teaching m e / t o cut a
pattern./Saturdays we buy the cloth./She takes it in her hands/ like a good idea, feeling/ for texture, grain, the built-in limits./ It’s only as an afterthought she asks/ and do you think it’s beautiful?” An old woman in one poem is “sorting chick peas from pebbles.” Though light plays on her face, “changing her,” “she has no care” for that: “she is at/her work.” These poems are at their work, leaving their long after-thought to their readers.

Erosion
Jorie Graham
Princeton University Press, $6.95, 83 pp.
 

The Kingfisher
Amy Clampitt Knopf, $6.95, 148 pp.