The best poem in Ned O’Gorman’s new book is “To the Memory of Lydia Hoffman.” It is about a figure in the poet’s youth, a servant and demonic sufferer: “She was in our house like a furnace; she roots/ now in my memory with the pikes of her agonies.” Several of Mr. O’Gorman’s recurrent themes appear here: the idea of obsession, the image of fire, the idea of childhood and the occurrence then of an original tragedy. As a child Lydia had seen her native farmhouse burn, and “at the moment the center/ timber fell, her father rose up burning on the roof.” Now she suffers “barbarities” and protects him.
Through her the children are finally transformed “into those who knew the ways extremity takes hold.” Lydia walks still through the “burned shadows and floating / timbers of the mind,” striking “the final, mating blow / of first calamities; of the father, the flaming rooftops, the gaping snows.” Everything in this poem works and is under control.
The idea of obsession produces some of Mr. O’Gorman’s most original poems. They deal with excess and they at once channel and satirize Mr. O’Gorman’s own poetic excesses, for his style is intense-baroque in the counter-thrusts of opposing forces. In these poems about obsession, humor presents the outrageous fact to the sane eye without ridiculing it. Our digressiveness is made to respect the concentration of obsession. In “The Dark Dialogue” a dreamer becomes possessed by his dream of a burning whirlwind (“Lift your feet,” says the listener. “You make the floor smoke.”) The listener, who had seemed sanely detached, breaks out at the end with: “‘I am Zero,’ / And closed him four-square round/ with ice.”
Animals and animal imagery dominate many poems. Despite the allegorical use made of the birds of the title poem, this interest in animals is not allegorical. Animal life in these poems is primarily something other than human life, valuable because it is so completely itself. Like obsessed figures, unified and intensified though distorted, animals are singular. Poems written from the inside of animals give us an idea of modes of perception that are rhino-like or hawk-like, but certainly not man-like. On the other hand, man may be animal-like or even vegetable-like.
This richness of the sense of other life presents the poet with the problem of control and cohesion. Of all the elements of Mr. O’Gorman’s poetry, rhetoric remains most self-willed. It has become subservient to the poet now—recognizably his—but not yet to the poem. It would be easy if the poet could mutter to himself, “Prends Yeloquence et tords lui le cou.” He is trying to do something like this by declaring for light over music in poetry. But in his best poems a kind of fusion is taking place. He may undercut his own rhetoric with self-mockery in the “obsessed” poems. Or his themes may coalesce, as they do in “Lydia Hoffman,” where his sense of suffering, of the obsessed, and of the primal come together to form a poem so large that it subdues the language of which it is born.
The Buzzard and the Peacock
Ned O’Gorman
Harcourt, Brace it-World
$3.95
