Eye of the Beholder

This deft, revelatory collection opens with a poem about the poet’s mother, in which Richard Greene speaks of shapes of memory from which she can / never turn away. Integral to his own “shapes of memory” is familial love, and Greene, who has written a brilliant critical biography of Edith Sitwell (herself no stranger to this most consuming of themes), does full justice to the subject in a range of poems that are at once carefully crafted and finely observed. They are also narrative: Each tells a distinct story, though, together, they log a rover’s homecoming, which is why the title is so nicely chosen.

In “Kitchens,” Greene describes meeting families while canvassing door-to-door, which drills into him the sacrificial exactions of parental love.

The wife’s head turns; she follows a sound into another room, leads out a girl of 25, bent far forward, holding her arm as guide. “Our daughter was born blind and deaf. It is different from other conditions.” .  .  .  I ask how things are for her but wonder all the while at no light and no words. “There is not much for her to do really,” says her mother, “we look out for her.”

Then, again, in the same poem, he encounters another married couple.

This time, a fellow not quite my age sits me down and signs the form—I ask what worries him? He says he has a daughter, and I can see some part of the story rigged at the head of the stairs—a chairlift. His business is rescuing stalled trucks on the highway .  .  .

Here, as in many of the poems, one can see the extent to which Greene has taken up and renovated Robert Lowell’s testimonial art, where so much seems a snapshot, / lurid, rapid, garish, grouped, / heightened from life, / yet paralyzed by fact, though even Greene’s bleakest “facts” never leave us with a sense of paralysis. On the contrary, the empathy he shows his subjects reaffirms their volatile dignity.

Although a professor of English at the University of Toronto, Greene has none of the delight in abstraction dear to the academic tribe. Instead, he puts himself to school to the actual, the restlessly human, an image of which he finds in Haiti when he notices Everywhere the trade in worn tires, salvaged / from cars that have crept to their millionth / mile and died. This solicitude for the actual is doubtless why he paints such a memorable portrait of a fellow rover, whom he encounters in Paris while dining at Les Deux Magots, where the saints of the / existential put out their cigarettes.

White beard and a lifetime on the streets make him old who might be fifty-five. I think he has exercised his share in the rights of man by saying no to a social worker. He stirs in August sunlight, stretches, stands. He wears just a t-shirt and boxer shorts gone grey. Long thin legs proclaim he is poorly fed though not quite starved. He yawns and walks towards a tree at the pavement’s edge, gazes up into leaves, tugs at elastic, and pees.

The roving behind so many of the poems produces a keen sense of place. In St. John’s, Newfoundland, on Christmas Eve, the newly married poet goes grocery shopping, only to encounter an epitome of unreturning bachelorhood: Among the meats I watched him, admired / the overcoat that cost him a bundle / at Tip Top, The London, or The Model Shop. / Guessed him thirty-five and unspoused. As L. P. Hartley has taught us, the past is a foreign country, and in that unforgettable land, Greene’s lyricism takes elegant flight.

And so it is, I am again a month shy of sixteen, the school-year ending, and everything else beginning. We circle the clover leafs, learn to shoulder check and to change lanes without risk of pile-up. Waiting my turn  in the back seat, I mouth the verses of a hymn, silent and growing wordless as they wind downwards to whatever there is of me, the unmade self. In the nights of that week, I pray for every soul I can remember, face by face, rising out of a boy’s memory. By the weekend, my mind has surrendered to the light of June. I take communion in an      evening church. As never before or after, I am given to love and fall from words.

Here is what George Herbert called “the soul in paraphrase, the heart in pilgrimage.” Greene appreciates these experiences in terms of prayer because he understands what T. S. Eliot meant when he wrote (in “Little Gidding”) that prayer is more / Than an order of words, the conscious occupation / Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying. Why? Because what the dead had no speech for, when living, / They can tell you, being dead: the communication / Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

In “Crooked Eclipses,” a memorial to a dead friend, Greene shows how the lesson of Eliot animates his own discovery of the eternal in the quotidian, what he elsewhere calls A glory bound to littleness and sorrow / in the pietà of the common day.

Yesterday, your son checked your email, read you my silly note, conveyed a hail from your sickbed, sent your love, spoke plainly: “In short, his condition worsens daily.” Just pain and sleep: chemo becomes morphine and seventy years of being have been; I substitute have seen you for will see. Tenses shift and I prepare for memory.

All of the works in Dante’s House rehearse the long eponymous poem about his sojourn in Italy with his students during the Palio, the annual horse race in July in Siena’s public square that the Sienese have conducted in honor of the Blessed Virgin since medieval times. Greene casts his sprightly poem in Dante’s terza rima with the same skill that Arthur Hugh Clough cast his poem about an Oxford reading party, The Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich, in Homer’s hexameters. Here, Greene captures the intersection of the timeless with time; and by presenting his theme through the lens of amor matris, he gives this entire collection the unifying principle it needs without compromising its journal-like immediacy and ebullience.

In one section, set in nearby Florence, the rover in Greene returns home in a recollection of his mother, which nicely exemplifies his deeply human aesthetic.

My mother thought her painting primitive; she learned illumination from a nun and then shrugged off the rules of      perspective, made a lit ocean deeper than the sun has power to light, the hammerhead, the whales, the coral life, all one in size; her gardens intricately spread with a kind of pointillism in each tree and leaf, the tiny strokes of things unsaid. I think she is with me in all I will see of art; and walks beside me in the rooms and corridors here at the Uffizi.

In a critical ethos that tends to lionize the coterie poet or unfathomable oracle (often one and the same), Richard Greene has managed to write a storyteller’s poetry that is at once meditative and pellucid.

Edward Short is the author, most recently, of Newman and His Family .