PERSON TO PERSON

by John Ciardi ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

John Ciardi is just the opposite of Berryman (see p. 329); he's not authentic at all, but quite acceptable. His poetry is easy to describe. Nor do you have necessarily to read his book to find it; merely keep up with the more serious published in magazines like the Saturday Review and New Yorker. Once upon a time Ciardi had a rough gruff metaphysical way of saying things or seeing things; then he became streamlined, a success. As he himself admits in the new collection: ""the wellknown poet, critic, editor and middle-high/aesthete of the circuit is, I."" Alas, alas. But of course he doesn't mean it. That's just his soul speaking and in the same poem his body retorts: ""You dried-out wet nurse/think you're the poet do you?.....You were gone/the instant I learned the poem is belly and bone."" (What does that mean, 0 Yeats?) Aside from suburban meditations on his ""wife, three children, and other investments,"" his father, his garden, or a polo match (reminiscent of Williams' Yachts), there are impressive delvings into philosophic, psychological and religious aspects of himself, his past, death, the Age and so forth. All the Lines seem good, e.g. ""everyone would like heaven as a second skin,"" then you reread them....Ciardi's a clever craftsman with moody masculine inventiveness now and then, but to rephrase a remark he makes about Edward Albee: nothing's missing from these poems expect a poet.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Gutgers Univ. Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1964

Categories: NONFICTION