POET'S CHOICE

By Robert Pinsky
Sunday, July 15, 2007

One pleasure of art comes from how accurately it can convey ambivalence. In a poem, form can have things both ways at once, emotionally: understated and bold, dark and bright, somber and funny, painful and cool, angry and sympathetic. Here is "Oil & Steel" from Henri Cole's new book:

My father lived in a dirty-dish mausoleum,

watching a portable black-and-white television,

reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica,

which he preferred to Modern Fiction.

One by one, his schnauzers died of liver disease,

except the one that guarded his corpse

found holding a tumbler of Bushmills.

"Dead is dead," he would say, an anti-preacher.

I took a plaid shirt from the bedroom closet

and some motor oil -- my inheritance.

Once, I saw him weep in a courtroom --

neglected, needing nursing -- this man who never showed

me much affection but gave me a knack

for solitude, which has been mostly useful.

This poem confirms that strong emotions are mixed emotions. Poetry can express, with precision, forever unresolved feelings like these.

"Oil & Steel" has 14 lines, like a sonnet. Instead of end rhyme, its lines often conclude with slight, polysyllabic echoes of consonant or vowel: "mausoleum," "television," "fiction," for example. A similar muffled similarity associates the sounds of "Bushmills," "courtroom," "useful." In relation to ambivalence, sonnets traditionally turn after the eighth line, taking a new, sometimes contradictory direction in the final six. "Oil & Steel" does that subtly when, after the father's "Dead is dead," the poem takes a somewhat softer, memorial turn with "I took a plaid shirt from the bedroom closet."

In another poem, "Self-Portrait With Red Eyes," Cole expresses double feelings with a less traditional structure in 14 lines. A lover's presence and absence correspond to two units divided precisely in the middle -- seven lines about having and seven lines about lacking:

Throughout our affair of eleven years,

disappearing into the pleasure-unto-death

acts I recall now as love and, afterward,

orbiting through the long, deep sleeps

in which memory, motor of everything,

reconstituted itself, I cared nothing about

life outside the walls of our bedroom.

The hand erasing writes the real thing,

and I am trying. I loved life and see now

this was a weakness. I loved the little

births and deaths occurring in us daily.

Even the white spit on your sharp teeth

was the foam of love, saying to me: It is not true,

after all, that you were never loved.

In both poems, the final line and a half works a little like a Shakespearean sonnet's couplet, resolving or summarizing mingled feelings of hurt and redemption.

(Henri Cole's poems "Oil & Steel" and "Self-Portrait with Red Eyes" are from his book "Blackbird and Wolf." Farrar Straus Giroux.

Copyright 2007 by Henri Cole.)

Robert Pinsky's most recent book of poetry is "Jersey Rain."