Poet's Choice

Allen Grossman's poetry is tethered to an antiquity that he both honors and subverts. His pastoral poems, for instance, fly in the face of the form's historic purpose first set out by Theocritus in Idylls and followed by Virgil in Ecologues. For them, pastoral portraits of rustic shepherd life celebrated a lost and golden age. Grossman's vision is darker: "At that time the sheep called to him/From their wormy bellies, as they/Lay bloating in the field. He was/A pastoralist." Grossman's grand and bardic style echoes the High Modernist capital-T Tradition that bred both Yeats and Eliot (about whom Grossman has written). He leavens his work with the hilarity of honky tonk and the Borscht Belt. "The Piano Player Explains Himself" is an ars poetica, in which the piano is an actual Messiah -- as poetry is, I think, when it's played right.

When the corpse revived at the funeral,

The outraged mourners killed it; and the soul

Of the revenant passed into the body

Of the poet because it had more to say.

He sat down at the piano no one could play

Called Messiah or The Regulator of the World. . . .

Grossman's lyric strategies sometimes involve repeating themes with the biblical-sounding circularity of Eliot's "Four Quartets" (themselves inspired by Beethoven's late quartets): "We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time."

In "The Work" Grossman sets out his purpose on the planet: to love, which for Grossman also involves writing:

A great light is the man who knows the woman he loves

A great light is the woman who knows the man she loves

And carries the light into room after room arousing