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The Pedestal Magazine > Archives > Issue 55 > Reviews >Anthony S. Abbott's New & Selected Poems, 1989-2009

New & Selected Poems, 1989-2009
Anthony S. Abbott
Lorimer Press
ISBN Number: 978-0-9789342-7-9

Reviewer: James Owens


          Anthony Abbott’s New & Selected Poems 1989-2009 serves as an extended meditation on the possibilities for finding meaning and comfort in the world through art and language and attention to the small beauties of the everyday that, when we are lucky and keep looking faithfully, often expand outward into the larger beauties of the transcendent. Much the same could be said of many poets, but Abbott is more skeptical than some about the undertaking, less apt to give in to the persuasions of the easy epiphany that can seem built into the poetic enterprise.

          “I’m such a romantic fool. That’s the problem,” Abbott muses in “The Man Who Speaks To His Daughter On Her 40th Birthday,” though we get the distinct impression that he is actually no fool at all, rather well aware of the snares laid for the unwary who try to negotiate the tricky ground between feeling and fact, and aware that those traps become doubly dangerous when one tries to represent feeling in language. He begins the poem already thinking about the balance he must find.
“Poetry is the supreme fiction,” says Wallace Stevens.
I know. Then how to express the truth, simple
and unadorned as Stevens’s “dresser of deal.”

You see, I am already equivocating, ducking
behind the decoration of language. So, stop me.
Good. That’s better. Now, tell me where you are.
          Poetics is at stake here, certainly, but so is much more than that. “The Man Who Speaks To His Daughter On Her 40th Birthday” is the final poem in the book, and a reader recognizes by this point that Abbott is addressing the conflicted matter of the “never was but might have been”—the memory and heartbreak over a daughter who died as a child runs throughout the book like a thin spine of grief, and here he is trying to imagine what she might have been like, had she lived to forty. The need for some sort of emotional resolution in the decades-long wake of this death is a persistent theme, along with the realization that it may not be possible to find such resolution, just as it may not be possible for the poet to stop searching for it.

          But much earlier, already in the book’s first poem, Abbott is holding vigilance against the “decoration of language,” admitting to the “need to write something/ simple and unadorned like/ a bride at a Quaker wedding/ or a single candle or the/ full moon on a winter night” (“Something Simple”). The recurrence of “simple and unadorned” at the book’s beginning and at its end is much more than the thoughtless repetition of a stock phrase—Abbott is too conscious a craftsman for that. It is, rather, an ideal the poet strives for, in full recognition that an ideal is, by definition, never fully attainable.

          Fred Chappell, in his introduction to this selection of Abbott’s work, identifies the poet’s dilemma accurately and perceptively: “Of all the world’s craftsmen, few will be so distrustful of his tools as the poet. If the carpenter believed that his saw would produce a ragged cut, he would discard it…. But the poet is forced to use words and those can only approximate or suggest or pallidly echo what is in their user’s mind and heart.” Chappell also notes that a “profound artistic skepticism underlies all the poems.”

          In public matters as in private, Abbott refuses the easy comfort of the sentimental in favor of the more difficult, but more real, one hopes, comforts of accuracy. “New York City—In the Subway, 2008” details a visit to the site of the 9/11 attack, where the poet finds “nothing there, absolutely nothing/ to help us remember the dead, nothing but/ orange dinosaur cranes lifting and sifting dirt,” though he does find some evidence of public memory, in the form of memorials to the attack’s victims, in nearby St. Paul’s Chapel, where visitors ”file in silence by the photographs/ and drawings, small tokens of life/ from those who felt the black cloud.”

          Nevertheless, the poem ends with a glimpse of the city persisting despite the ravages of recent history and perhaps even managing to offer some beauty to the observant—and the vision is real, though we can’t help feeling its precariousness:
I take the N train back
to Manhattan. As we rise into the open
air and cross the East River, the sun is setting

over the Statue of Liberty. The Brooklyn Bridge
glows like a talisman. Sparks of illumination
climb from the water, upward to the tall buildings,
hanging there, momentarily, before the train
slides once more into darkness.
          Such moments are possible, even if they are rare, Abbott suggests, moments of grace when the needs of the heart and the evidence of the eyes shift into balance.

          “Blood Red of Late October” presents one more such moment of “new found grace,” this time on an autumn afternoon in the South (Abbott is a professor emeritus at Davidson College in North Carolina). Walking up “from the cemetery to the college campus/ on the hill,” the poet finds,
In the South, October lingers, the gold
sun glances off the trees. November will

come with its cold rains soon enough.
I know. I turn the dazzle inward
and down. It courses through the veins
and lofts me toward the breathless light.
          It is possible, Abbott insists in the music of vowels and alliteration, for even the most realistic of us to be lofted “toward the breathless light,” but only after paying the price contained in the simple phrase “I know,” the clear-eyed knowledge that the coming winter is also real and inevitable.

          Anthony Abbott’s New & Selected Poems is a fine and welcome overview of a distinguished career in poetry. Readers new to his work will find that the moments of grace are all the more precious for having been earned.
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