Poet's Choice

By Robert Pinsky
Sunday, April 1, 2007

Certain scenes keep returning in memory to represent something essential in a life, the way bits of a movie trailer represent the movie -- a scrap of dialogue, a facial expression, a landscape. Poetry, by creating such a scene in one life -- something Mother once said, for example -- can crystallize and hold up for inspection forces that govern life in general. Poetic attention gives the circumstances of a moment in one life some of the enduring qualities of myth. Here is an extraordinary poem of that kind from Tom Sleigh's new book, Space Walk:

The Hole

Out in the garden, the wind was like a dog

digging in the snow, digging with its nails

to make a bed to lie down in against the freezing air:

and in my exhaustion, my stupefied numb thought

dug and dug its way down to where I knew

you were--though how could I believe it?

Once, your irony and honesty refused

to let you say, "Oh yes, my son the genius!"

when I showed you a poem-- saying with Groucho deadpan,

as you handed me back the paper, the typed words

already a little smudged: "Hopkins is a good poet."

And then you recited, " Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?. . . " winking

at the poets not yet born . . . poets who would

come after me, poets who would not believe

there was any such woman as you,

who would say of them and their poetry,

shrugging a little, smiling your sly, lopsided grin:

"How old are you, hon? From what I've read,

your sex life must be very important to you."

Digging in the snow, digging with its nails

down deep in the snow, the wind kept trying

to hollow a hole deep enough to escape its own bitter

blowing of snow around the frozen garden.

The casual, good-humored, even detached language of "with Groucho deadpan" does not conceal the fact that this little moment leaves not just a wound, but a scar. The specific dialogue between mother and son, the image of the restless wind churning snow with doglike persistence, the phrase quoted from Gerard Manley Hopkins, the unsettled and unsettling mixture of comedy and wound, communication and rage are elements that have all the tremendous, expansive and universal eloquence of the particular.

(Tom Sleigh's poem "The Hole" is from his book "Space Walk." Houghton Mifflin. Copyright 2007 by Tom Sleigh.)

Robert Pinsky's most recent book is "The Life of David."