FROM SNOW AND ROCK, FROM CHAOS

by Hayden Carruth ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1973

Since he retired to farming, Carruth, Hudson Review editor, has become decidedly a poet of place; and the locale -- Vermont's Green Mountains -- has merged so inextricably with his emotional landscape that we can't really tell which is coloring which. The mood at any rate is melancholic and apprehensive -- chaos knocks at the doors of comfort -- and the concerns are basic, here almost to the point of sentimentality although they are potentially poetry's grandest themes (love, death, nature). Carruth sacrifices grandeur for fidelity to perception and feeling and to the poems' own original impulses. We gather from the sudden and arbitrary shifts in style (sometimes tersely clipping off articles, sometimes luxuriating in description) that his relationship to his surroundings, intimate as it is, is not yet finally resolved. A nice rough genuineness, but rather limited in scope.

Pub Date: March 1, 1973

ISBN: 0811204693

Page Count: -

Publisher: New Directions

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1973

Categories: NONFICTION