Michael Dirda

it in wax.

The labor process ends in the creation of a thing,

Which when the process began

Already lived as the worker's image.

Zukofsky frequently employs such "quotations," since he valued recurrence, repetition and allusion as a basic structural principle of art. But he also believed that "only objectified emotion endures." Shortly after his marriage, he drafted a poem of "pure erotic abandon":

Drive, fast kisses,

no need to see

hands or eyelashes

a mouth at her ear

trees or leaves

night or the days.

A dazzling verbal engineer, Zukofsky twice replicated in "A" the pervasive rhyme sounds of Guido Calvalcanti's famously intricate love poem "Donna mi priegha." (Zukofsky's actual words reflect on the Marxist theory of value and Spinoza's understanding of love.) This ideal of translating the aural structure of a poem eventually led to the poet's notorious versions of Catullus. In these Zukofsky actually emulates the original Latin sounds in his English words but also keeps close to their meaning. Here, for instance, are the opening lines of Catullus viii, Zukofsky in roman and Catullus in italics:

Miss her, Catullus? don't be so inept to rail

Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire,

at what you see perish when perished is the case.

Et quod vides perisse perditum ducas.

Zukofsky's collaborator on this translation, as for much of his work, was his wife, Celia, a talented musician and composer. Her "L.Z. Masque" forms the last section of "A," and her score for a kind of opera of Shakespeare's "Pericles" makes up the second volume of "Bottom: on Shakespeare," that densely written, quotation-filled personal encyclopedia devoted to the proportion "love: reason :: eyes: mind."

The Poem of a Life sports a striking cover photograph of its subject -- by that versatile and much-regretted man of letters Jonathan Williams (see p. 4 of this issue for a tribute to him) -- and shows the thin poet tightly buttoned up, all wool coat, thick glasses and cap. In truth, he looks a bit formidable, which seems appropriate, for not everyone will be drawn to the verbal music and allusive intricacies of Louis Zukofsky. But Mark Scroggins certainly makes us understand that the author of "A" is a major poet, and he prods us into wanting to read him. After all, the test of poetry, said Zukofsky, "is the range of pleasure it affords as sight, sound, and intellection. This is its purpose as art." ·

Michael Dirda's e-mail address is mdirda@gmail.com.