Poet's Choice

By Robert Pinsky
Sunday, September 2, 2007

James Hoch's poems approach subjects such as grief, loss and violation in a way that feels freshly inspired by reality. For example, instead of resorting to the literary or cinematic clich?s of a deathbed scene, he manages to express the limited but distinct good of pain-killing medication: that island of practical comfort, surrounded by dread and sorrow, of common experience:

Morphine

The man lying in bed is dying

from cancer, flecks of bone

flow like ice in his blood.

Outside it's snowing,

lightly in the street, white petals

from a pear tree.

Everything is starting

to feel immense. His children,

like four pylons,

quietly resemble each other.

They pull at glasses

of Dewar's. They can't help

but notice the petals, the snow

blowing together in the street.

They chat politely, take salt

from his forehead,

on their lips, as they go

out the door, agreeing

he looks bad. They don't know

the man's floating on

a blue raft, an ocean, a small

Pacific. He's smoking

a pleasant cigarette; it's nice,

lukewarm, no undertow.

The originality of this poem gathers gradually through a series of cool, all-but-detached observations. The Dewar's, the polite chat, the pathetic flatness of words such as "he looks bad" convey the feeling of ordinary life under its extraordinary stresses.

The poem has a cheering quality that might at first be invisible, or mystifying: How can this account of a death from cancer have a kind of smiling, humane element? The answer to that question is in the gift of imagination: in this case, literally a gift, the final scene being given by the poet to the dying man's children, or to us readers. The attempt to think what the morphine sleep might feel like is the poet's version, in art, of the jokes that are part of a funeral or wake in some traditions. The poet's assurance in creating the final scene, as if knowing what cannot really be known, has a gentle irony about its own pretending -- the voice of imagination not denying the harshness of loss, but surviving it. ?

(James Hoch's poem "Morphine" can be found in his book "Miscreants: Poems." Norton. Copyright 2007 by James Hoch.)

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