|
“The self that Robert Hazel sings is isolated among multitudes it does not contain, and yet it contains an apparently inexhaustible multitude of images and memories, the stuff of its pain and its strange exultation. This book is the testimony of ‘the man who cannot exceed himself.’” So writes Wendell Berry about Robert Hazel’s Clock of Clay: New and Selected Poems. The collection contains some poems from hazel’s four earlier books, but others are newly minted, this the bright insistence of new coins and all their hardness. The poems leave a metallic taste in the mouth, both pleasurable and frightening, like the taste of blood. Hazel’s sensibility is a contradictory one, for he loves the particulars of this world enough to note then in exquisite and surprising detail even as he mocks the philosophers who attempt to make a coherent whole from these disparate elements. Take as an example these lines from the title poem: Now I echo the shadow I am
Losses chain me & I’m stuck in the mud,
the dirt of death on my hands
& the world shrinks to my cowboy sombrero
when I was green as an ideal twig
,when I sang while milking cows & flooded
cats’ pink mouths
with white comets from lavish teats
I am only a reed, the weakest reed in nature
but I am a thinking reed These poems couple an enduring compassion with an anger both artful and deeply felt. In “Health Education & Welfare Social Security & Disability Office, Leesburg, Florida,” for instance, Hazel describes a moment of tender communication between a white man and a black woman whose “amber face tugged my attention like a fish on my line.” The speaker’s pessimistic view of the woman’s chances against the bureaucracy coexists movingly with his hopes for her survival. Like a pendulum, Clock of Clay swings between the beauties of language and the description of harsh emotions. Hazel’s unfailing sense of balance, however, creates a synthesis both pleasing and disturbing, a blending that has led Howard Nemerov to call Hazel a poet of “great seriousness” and Allen Tate to praise him as “one of the best of the second half of the century.” This new collection certainly confirms the assessments of both writers.
Robert Hazel, retired professor of English and creative writing at New York University, now lives in Eustis, Florida. He is author of four previous poetry collections—Poems, 1951–1961; American Eagle; Who Touches This; and Soft Coal.
|
