Williamson, a professor at Univ. of Calif. (Davis), models his work
- this is his fourth collection-on Robert Lowell, whose blend of
personal history and political engagement Williamson studied in his
scholarly Pity the Monsters (1974). Like the latter Lowell,
Williamson opens his long lines to matters of the world at large,
and even throws in the mix some Lowell-like translations (of Dante
and Montale). The title section announces Williamson's heady
intent, but the result is disappointing. His glib sense of history
and politics seems filtered largely through TV: "A Childhood Around
1950" mocks that quiescent period as one in which "the electric
chair troubled no one"; the Sixties flash by in poems about Chicago
in '68, the Rolling Stones, Leonard Cohen, and Altamont, which he
sees - without the slightest originality - as the end of the
countercultural promise. The Eighties dissolve into a collage of
desperation: "Silkwood" (the movie, not the historical figure!),
Reagan's second victory, mass murderers, vigilantes, a kidnaped
child. An elegy for Kurt Cobain ("Limit of Volume") completely
misses the point, and Williamson's cynicism emerges in "La
Pastorela," which suggests that nothing ever changes. Many of the
non-public poems search out the "Buddha-nature" in things ( cats,
dinosaurs, asteroids), and a tribute to Lowell and Peter Taylor
("giants in the earth") builds to an anecdote taken wholesale from
Lowell's biography. It's hard to decide what's more annoying:
Williamson's strange sense of the "us" in history, or his fanlike
idolatries. (Kirkus Reviews)
This collection of poetry faithfully moves from the private to the
publ ic, from individual experience to civic responsibility through
an elegy for the 1960s and the world that has become our own. The
meditative analysis is expanded, from introspection to the troubled
psyche of Vietnam-age America. In poems like "La Pastorela" there
is an overlay of classical and popular echoes, heightening personal
reminiscences.
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