Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement,, by Sylvia Plath, Frieda Hughes (Harper, 2005)

Since about 1980, I have probably read Ariel six times and every time I step back from it thinking, My God! It remains for me among the most powerful collections of poetry I’ve ever read. However, whereas my previous readings of Ariel – all edited and arranged by Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes – left me in awe of numerous poems within the collection, the new edition (published in 2005) has enabled me to read, for the first time, Plath’s arrangement, which jacks things up considerably. How could that be possible?

I have no side in the Hughes / Plath wars. He cheated on her; she was high maintenance. As an outsider, it’s impossible to know much more beyond that surface story. On the poetry side of things, I have always thought that Hughes (a superb poet), with his violent and powerful imagery (see Crow), provided an assist in Plath’s own growth as a poet. Being the smart writer that she was, she would not be outdone in savage imagery, especially when Hughes provided her, though his adultery, with a red hot core of poetic purpose.

I don’t think this can be downplayed in any way. Frieda Hughes, the couple’s daughter, clearly acknowledges, in her indispensible Introduction, what we all know – Ariel is an act of revenge. For Frieda, this is a difficult and sensitive subject. She loved her father; she loved her mother. She does try to recycle – though she doesn’t necessarily accept – the old Hughes’ argument that the earlier arrangement was done for Art’s sake. Not so; not even close. While a few poems could have been dropped as weak (“Barren Woman” and “Magi” being, among numerous reviewers, agreed upon examples); overall, the restored poems are very strong.

The placement of the poems within the collection is important. In fact, one could argue that, if Plath’s collection was an act of literary revenge, Hughes’ editing was an act of literary violence. He deliberately muddied the waters, blurring the impact of the collection as a whole. You see this in both the beginning and ending of the collection. The new edition follows an arc – an arc that, with all its ferocious savagery, strangely enough becomes transcendent with the last grouping of poems, which ends with “Wintering.” In the earlier edition of Ariel, Hughes has these poems (starting with “Daddy”) in sequence, but then tacks on a monkey’s tail grab bag of poems that robs the reader of the sense of closure that Plath’s arrangement provides. (It also helps to dilute the impact of the accusatory “Daddy.”)

However, it’s the beginning of the collection that really shocked me. The dropping of “The Rabbit Catcher,” a very strong poem, and one that must have burned Hughes’ ears right off, is where the damage to Plath’s purpose is most obvious. The poem’s final lines, its images, are claustrophobic, violent, and unbowed:

I felt a still busyness, an intent.
I felt hands around a tea mug, dull blunt,
Ringing the white china.
How they awaited him, those little deaths!
They waited like sweethearts. They excited him.
(“The Rabbit Cather”)

It’s a key poem, the third in the collection, and it establishes a foundation for the recurring accusatory poems (“A Secret,” “The Jailer,” “Daddy”). These poems are part of an intended tapestry. I have no doubt this restored version of Ariel will be the one that will now be studied. Hughes’ deceptive version will also be studied, but it will exist as a footnote. It’s a testimony to the power of Plath’s poems that Ariel can exist in both forms, but there is no doubt which is the better version.

Rosalie, in her pink pinafore, laughs round with the rest of them, for she knows the story of the plague. With a pocket full of buttercups, she sings, Charred and dead, charred and dead, and thinks of her mother, at home sucking on a bottle.

The children grip each other’s hands tightly and press closer to the cat. Charred and dead, charred and dead.

Rosalie, in her bare feet, grins the hardest, for the next game is hers. They will chase each other through the trees, brandishing ribbons and belts and swigging clear liquid from bottles that never grow dust. Maybe today will be the day Rosalie cracks a bottle on someone’s head.

Into These Knots, by Ashley Anna McHugh (Ivan R. Dee, 2010)

Ashley Anna McHugh’s first collection of poetry, Into These Knots (winner of the 2010 New Criterion Poetry Prize), takes its title from a line in Canto XIII of Dante’s Inferno. This is the famous “suicides” Canto, where Dante and Virgil converse with poet and statesman, Pier delle Virgne, whose fate, as a suicide, has left him encased in a thorny tree. It’s a powerful passage about choices – and their consequences:

The Poet began again: “That this man may,
    with all his heart do for you what your words
    entreat him to, imprisoned spirit, I pray,

tell us how the soul is bound and bent
    into these knots, and whether any ever
    free itself from such imprisonment.”

The response is what you would expect, as the suicide-poet confesses there is no relief, since the body was thrown away—rejected. The act insures the fate (suicide bodies hanging from trees on Judgment Day) in a brutal arithmetic that leaves Dante, a poet as well, choked up. As John Ciardi points out in his introduction to the Canto, “Only through their own blood do they find voice.” Any poet, tormented or not, can appreciate that summation.

How does McHugh use this pregnant passage for her own use? Well, that’s complicated, since the collection is hardly about suicides (though there are some suicide themed poems). The operative word here is “knots” which could easily be translated into “experience.” Generally, the poems are personal, often filled with pain – and questions.  McHugh usually employs rhyme, but in such a way that it’s hardly noticed.  This is probably due in part to McHugh being something of a dramatist as well. In the collection’s first poem, “Deer Hunting,” the speaker recalls a picture of her father with a kill, proud of his accomplishment in what is probably an annual ritual.  However, from the very first line, there is a warning, a suggestion (“that sagging neck”), of roles about to be reversed:

Beware the favor of God
The muzzle dropped, dead eyes float back
in their slits as my father lifts
that sagging neck by its antler rack.

The picture is taken, the deer cleaned, an annual rhythm that reassuringly is maintained:

He gutted it clean, then hung that deer
from the apple tree. We ate
its warm dark meat all winter that year.

“That year” is significant — things change, fortune turns.  The next year fate inserts itself into the lives of all. The speaker’s father falls from his tree stand and breaks his back. As he lies in pain among the dead leaves, he asks the Jobian question: Why?  And McHugh responds, via The Book of Job, with the (dissatisfying) voice from the whirlwind. Though I’m not sure how far McHugh wanted to take the “apple” tree, she has nevertheless opened up the poem to a theological interpretation with the poem’s first line: “Beware the favor of God.” This is a dark, sad poem. It’s very reminiscent of Anthony Hecht, and yet the setting is very American (unlike the more cosmopolitan Hecht). It has the trappings and grit of a story by Faulkner or Hemingway, but the poetry is wholly McHugh’s.

Following the events of the first poem is a seemingly connected sequence that includes “Into These Knots,” “One Important and Elegant Proof,” and “If you will, you can all become flame.”

“Into These Knots” is told from the point of view of the fallen father, suffering, endlessly reliving his fall, and wondering about the existence of God. The next poem, “One Important and Elegant Proof,” exists almost as a fusion of mini-play and poem. McHugh prefaces the poem with a passage from a similarly styled effort, “For the Time Being,” by Auden. The viewpoint has shifted, as the speaker is now again the daughter, having a therapy session with a non-responsive doctor. Throughout the reader is reminded of “the clock.” The session is coming to an end, but the young woman is pondering timeless things. She recalls being at a church service, watching people cry as a parade of boys swinging censers pass by the pews. She soon discovers that she herself is crying. Is it because she has sensed the Holy?

She knew she ought to talk. “I guess I think
Maybe the ritual of it had moved me?
Or maybe God was really there? Or else
The Holy Spirit? Something. Maybe not.
It was a visceral response, almost.
Simple. Simple is just the only word.”

The doctor is insensitive to such ponderings; however, the reader, following the sequence, senses movement – acceptances, if not understandings, of what God allows.

All the interplay between father and daughter clears the poetic table for the transcendent and prayer-like “If you will, you can all become flame”: “Father of fathers, /speak to me tonight. Let my hand ignite. Here,/ fingers tipped with flame, I will understand You… “ This prayer-poem, at this point in the sequence, is clearly earned, even necessary.

I hate to frontload my review in such a way, but it’s clear that McHugh, in these poems, along with the collection’s epigram from Phillippians 2:12 (“Now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling”), is establishing a foundation of questions and topics that will inform the rest of the collection. On the surface, this may seem to be a collection about faith. However, that’s probably too strong an assertion. Hope – or the possibility of hope (“work out”) – would seem more accurate.

After this intense and cathartic opening, the collection’s first section (there are three) shifts gears, with McHugh providing some relief with the humorous “From His Mistress” providing an excellent rebuttal to Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.” What follows is an excellent grab bag of Baudelaire, youthful affairs, non-Plathian suicide poems, and a letter-poem from Auden to Isherwood (which I really liked).

In the collection’s second section, McHugh ramps things up again, with an ambitious long sequence called “Cairns.” It’s a complicated father-son poem that crosses back and forth through time. In her notes to the poem, McHugh states that the sequence was partly influenced by Auden’s “Sonnets From China.” In an attempt to understand McHugh’s poem better, I sat down and re-read Auden’s work and didn’t see, other than a loose use of the sonnet form, where the influence was. That said, after several readings, I found myself increasingly drawn to this section. Like the earlier “One Important and Elegant Proof,” the poem resembles a play. (I couldn’t help but be reminded, while reading “Cairns,” of Bruce Springsteen’s “Mansion on a Hill,” from his stark Nebraska album.) “Cairns” tells the story of Jake, who is recalling his now dead father and how they hiked a Forest Service road in West Virginia. Evidently, active munitions are still buried on the trail, and those that are discovered are surrounded by protective stone cairns in order to warn other hikers. This father-son journey is of course a metaphor-for-life type of poem. That aside, what really stuck to me was McHugh’s physical descriptions of the land. McHugh, in both her formalism and her concerns regarding sin and the possible existence of salvation, has been hugely influenced by Anthony Hecht and W.H. Auden; but, it’s her rootedness to the land as an American poet that really jumps out at me and makes her unique. In “Cairns,” with its shifting wilderness shadows and stream of consciousness voices, McHugh’s literary cousin is better found in Faulkner’s “The Bear.”

The third section of the collection seems the weakest, populated with cast offs (“Hunting Accident” – see the much better “Deer Hunting”) and lighter fare (“Fling” and “My Mother’s Guide to Getting Hitched and Staying that Way”). One funny poem worked well for me, “In Praise of a Light Bulb.” Although I groaned at McHugh’s “ogling” / “boggling” rhyme, I’m fairly certain that was intended. However, the section’s last poem, “From Tuliptrees,” returns the reader to an American landscape. This is a lovely poem about love, loss, memory, and moving on. As an endpoint for the collection, it’s perfect. It captures, in a poetic nutshell, McHugh’s hard won wisdom within a landscape that complements those understandings:

The spring has gone, and all that could have been
          has been — but the wind’s low pitched whine
          still whistles the woods as it did back then . . . .

From tulip trees to eastern hemlock groves,
we rose until the yellow birches tangled air.
          Ours was the first of many loves,
          and I pass as though you are not here.

“четверть A.S. за одним (etverti A.S. za odnim),” I replied. (“One-fifteen p.m.”)

But there was no “she,” and the “I” was not really “I” (or “me”). Neither existed: the lovely Japanese tourist who had asked the time, or the middle-aged man who looked to her like a native New Yorker, but was actually an agent of the KGB (actual current acronym: FSB, or, in English, FSS). The imaginary spy’s cover was Cultural Attache’ to the Soviet embassy. His rudimentary, but decent Japanese was, of course, an asset.

This conversation between me and I had its own cover. Nowadays, most people swarm up and down the sidewalks muttering or shouting into I-phones, blackberries, whatevers. If my knowledge here sounds spotty, it is because these new-fangled gizmos interest me only to the extent that they allow me to get on with my own –-my only– business, which is auto-conversation. All I need to qualify for honorary membership in the chattering classes is a white ear plug in each ear. No more brows furrowed in sympathy or mouths gaping in astonishment. And no more fear of uniformed figures rushing down the block toward me bearing strait-jackets or butterfly nets. Needless to say, the ear plugs also enhance the audibility of auto-conversation.

*

“何時にそれがあるか私に言うことができるか? (Nanji nisoregaaruka watashi ni iu kotogadekiruka?)” she asked again.

“четверть A.S. за одним, (etverti A.S. za odnim),” I replied again.

“Thank you.”

“гостеприимсво re (gostepriimsvo re).” (“Don’t mention it.”)

“But speak English, please,” she requested. “I know you are not a Russian. When I visit New York, I prefer to practice my English. So stop playing a fool!”

That gave us (me and I) pause. Should we continue this conversation, which was threatening to get out of hand? We considered.

*

“But why?” you or I ask, “would one talk exclusively to one’s self?”

There are a myriad of reasons, many stemming from a central theme: the migration of pain. For example, a few years ago, shortly before my own (e)migration, I attended a bookstore event for a newly published non-fiction work on Africa. After the obligatory excerpt had been proffered, the q&a began, and it quickly reached full throttle.

“Now that the Cold War is over,” someone asked (said), “why should I care about Africa?” The questioner, paunchy, goateed, and middle-aged, looked as if he were proud of some special accomplishment. He punctuated his rhetorical question by tapping a fingernail against the cover of his newly purchased copy of the book.

Replied the author, lightning quick: “The unoriginal thoughts I have on this” [you know-nothing asshole!] “revolve around African poverty as an incubator for dread diseases that pass across oceans, as a generator of massive flows of illegal immigrants, and so on.” He sipped from his water glass. The questioner did not stick around at the end to have his book signed.

*

I decided. “‘Speak English’? By all means. Shall we lose that Russian spy, then, and go have a cup of coffee together?”

“Yes, that’s much better,” she or I said. And she took my arm (“she” –since I cannot take my own arm, at least not in the way she took it, by pushing her hand from back to front between it and my torso.) We entered a coffee bar, ordered, sat down at a small round corner table, and were soon chatting away amiably. One thing led to another –whispers, glances, laughter, touches, kisses– and we found ourselves in her hotel room, naked, amidst a twist of sex-soaked sheets.

*

All too soon, I found myself back out on the sidewalk. Once again, people were muttering or shouting into their devices. With my white buttons in place, I moved on.

“Something,” said me, “was not quite right about that conversation.”

I agree,” said I.

“Shall we try again?”

“何時にそれがあるか私に言うことができるか? (Nanji nisoregaaruka watashi ni iu kotogadekiruka?)”

“четверть A.S. за одним. (etverti A.S. za odnim).”

“Thank you.”

“гостеприимсво re. (gostepriimsvo re).”

* The editors of Third Wednesday have nominated Singer’s story, “On Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘One Art,’ “ for a Puschcart Prize.

A fish comes to surface
composed that instant
by light and by the sense
a weeping man must make of fracture.

The man has a small daughter.
Her ribs are growing into a boat.
He wants to warn her of its hollow,
soon to carry the shape of his ghost.

over, where the trees meet the road and the fog lifts.
Isn’t it over? I keep it by thinking it. I keep thinking the road.
I keeping thinking pine scent, pine barren,

I keep thinking it’s over there, and over there, it lifts.
I keep thinking it over, as the cow says of the moon.
I keep thinking

it keeps like a ghost drawing form
from breath. I keep thinking of its death.
I keep thinking years and days.
Will the years and days keep for a minute?

What the ghost is, the moon will not say. The ghost is
over the bridge.

Simulated pine wafts from the dash.
We’re packed into the rental car’s
plush interior, a Victorian maroon.
Clouds drape the sky: pink festoons,
or a chain of bandages on a leg.
I’m basting in heat and fragrance.

All along the Strip, white-rimmed tires
and turquoise cars outdo water and sky.
My mind’s an incontinent collector,
a sieve with tears in the mesh.
It plucks the things of the world
for its uses—so removed

from context, they collapse
into mere iterations of an aesthetic. . .
Is this a symptom of a historical moment?
Metaphors are cheaply made. I’m tired of pink
and the loud hydraulics of my brain.