Michael McClure goes at the Godhead the way some men pound at a
stuck door. Since the late Fifties, he's tried screaming curses,
grunting meaninglessly in "beast language," writing "meat science
essays" - and now he's giving Keatsian rhyme a shot in the cause of
body-awareness and pan-everythingism. McClure may be our only
genuine megaphone poet. "YES! THERE IS BUT ONE/ POLITIC AND THAT/
IS BIOLOGY." "I/ AM/ A MAMMAL/ PATRIOT." Still, with all his talk
about the "holistic" and the "flow of the biomass" and "the
shattered substrate incorporating chop and moil," McClure is, as he
ages, getting a little calmer; when his eyes aren't goggling at the
biomass at a hundred rpm's, he can even write a fine, alert poem
like "By the Highway." But he's no less brave than ever. Few
contemporary poets so consistently skirt the hilarious. Or so often
fall into it: "We're otters swimming in the shadows of the now."
McClure is the kind of poet it would be great fun to read if you
knew no English - all those capital letters and the
ants-in-the-pants energy! For English speakers, though, subject to
understanding, this Whole Me Catalogue is so much rapturous farina.
(Kirkus Reviews)
Antechamber and Other Poems, Michael McClure's latest book with New
Directions, joins a growing list of contributions that includes the
verse collection September Blackberries (1974) and Jaguar Skies
(1975) as well as the musical play Gorf (1976). His writing in
recent years is "alchemical" in its intent, yet his twin
declarations, "Biology Is Politics" and "I Am A Mammal Patriot,"
perhaps express more accurately both the universality of his
outlook and its humane particularity. McClure's mysticism is
vigorously scientific. Even the familiar patterned shapes of his
poems remind us of the stars in the night sky and those we see when
we shut our eyes. In the dancing lines of his newest work--the
title poem "Antechamber" most especially--are the whirl of
galaxies, the radiance of molecules, the energy lines of the double
helix coiling around its core.
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