Grounded

GIMMICKRY and sentimentality are not enough. A good book of poetry should be both well-written and philosophical, expressing a cohesion of experience. Flying Inland, by Kathleen Spivack, is neither. Spivack's poetry lacks a unifying voice. Each poem remains a solitary, cricket-like rasp, grating in the reader's ear. Nothing justifies printing poor writing in any case, and nothing justifies placing these poems in a collection.

This slim volume is Spivack's first publishing effort, written while she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study. She has studied with various well-known poets like John Malcolm Brinnin and Robert Lowell, but their influence is remarkably absent in this collection.

However, Spivack's poetry can be startlingly vivid, and often very fine lines peer through the intimidating mass of bad ones. Almost every poem has a least one strong image or technical device which works well. Her best poem deals with an unpretentious subject: "A Child's Visit to the Biology Lab." When she describes formaldehyde jars, her use of simple detail works beautifully:

And babies too. Brine flowers, their blind eyes enclosed al specimens coral.

Where their belly buttons grew they floated, pink and new as toes. They swam in a shield of arms.

Here her alliteration works, subtly drawing the passage together without bombarding the reader with useless repetition. The imagery is strong and suggestive, but not full of the mixed metaphor which detracts in so many of her other pieces. She gives a credible child's insight into an adult world. Spivack writes best when she refrains from being overtly cosmic.

Her heavy-handed onslaught of forced alliteration is the most obvious flaw. The result would be laughable if she were attempting a parody of Gerard Manley Hopkins--but she's not. She's perfectly serious:

lavishing, in leaking roses, borders of bachelor's buttons, blue at the buttonhole, and the scent of solitary sentry lilies: sentences burgeoning like blood from a slit artery...

She occasionally alternates the strident alliteration with straight prose phrases, which burden the poems with a weighty self-conscious tone: "Eyes nosing into everything/with paddy paws I lounge among the leaves/I have forgotten how a human grieves."

EXCLAMATION points and oozing over-statement fill the entire collection. "howling,/hooding the head against horror. Human!" Her lines abound with histrionics, "oh brain, too much marked cave!" Attempting to be unconventional, Spivack occasionally borrows from e.e. cummings--with disastrous results. Bordering on sentimentality, she often omits capital letters in a consciously precious way.

not even the smallest, the most tender of the animals has forgotten the small place, the walls of his touch.

Spivack's use of formal rhyme produces childish, stilted versification. Her form does not strengthen the poem, but remains glaringly obvious, never blending into the total fabric of the work. She rhymes only to prove she can rhyme.

When there is no magic, one stays toad and we who screamed to know it, know it and grow old.

Her lack of rhythm also detracts from and sometimes interferes with an objective reading of the book. Her lines don't flow smoothly and lump together like coagulated oatmeal. "Five seagulls, circumflex accents, drift by." She displays a penchant for using formalistic inversions which add nothing but stiffness to the line: "that five-petaled sun/folds all its fruited segments out..." Spivack tends to generalize about the whole human race, instead of speaking from her own personal experience and leaving it at that.

Daily wives grow more unkind and pink, and I must do with what was done when glutton, be content with television--plastic tit--count calories while they invent a better kind of missile kit.

Her subject matter is diverse, ranging from cripples and toads to sex and lobotomy. But the collection as a whole has no particular coherence, no central voice or theme which roots it all together. The poems remain solitary and unwieldy. Spivack's awkward effort ultimately fails due to a lack of cohesive, unifying philosophy. This book tries to fly inland to the "highways" of the mind. Unfortunately, it does all that and more--and succeeds beautifully at winging rapidly downhill.