All of It Singing by Linda Gregg 224 pages Graywolf Press, 2008 TCR Bookstore Price: $18.00 Buy this book through our Amazon.com-affiliated bookstore and support The Cortland Review.

When a reviewer bubbled that Linda Gregg's poems were "luscious," I knew what he meant: the romantic woundedness, the stoicism and mythic air, the terra cotta simplicity, the mannered quietism embodied in shards of participial fragments. There was also the impulse toward utterance released from any obligation to circumspection. For example, in "The Chorus Speaks Her Words as She Dances," we hear such apparently artless outbursts as this: "I adore you. I take you seriously, even if I am alone in this," and in "The Beckett Kit," the poet proclaims, "Ah world, I love you with all my heart," to which it would be churlish to add the exclamation point, though one is added in the mind nonetheless. The last poet to accomplish this feat, so resistant to the knowing protocols of contemporary poetry, was Randall Jarrell. It wasn't that Jarrell had a penchant for cheesy lines; rather it was how well the cheesy lines from life bled through the usually protective shell of art and so seemed impervious to art's protection. A male poet I admire once told me that he would never write the word "heart" in a poem. I dare say there are many who would march to the same drum. So Gregg's poems, with their spectrum strung between imploring and withstanding, invite partisanship at the moment the voice sounds.

Most of the poet's work from five previous volumes finds its way into All of It Singing, as well as important new poems. While the issue of the voice, like Ariadne's thread, leads readers again and again to something additional the poet wishes to say—something about where she's coming from and how hard or soft, or again something about the creation of presence, that most kicked around of essential qualities—what I have found most interesting in Gregg's poems is their relation to the life of poetry as such and to myth, and believe me when I say that I'm aware that they can be construed as the same.

Now, a life in poetry is no mean thing. Today the expectation is that the poet's reduced fate leaves her compact with the life of academia, so that the rewards of the poetic life are likewise consistent with the rewards of academic life. Were it not for the academic bailout, it's doubtful I would have thought the life of poetry an issue. But it also breeds, as everybody and his chimp knows, the faults that belong to academe. Be that as it may, the life of the poet in the life of poetry is a distinct thing, university or no. Linda Gregg has shown one plausible—and commendable, if austere—form of what that life might be like in her career of nearly four decades. She has built a body of work that is formally rigorous and thematically recursive, and her work has remained for me as compelling today as when I first read it back in 1976. That year I was editing an anthology of new American poets, and Joseph Brodsky called me up to lay down the law: "David, if you want your anthology to be a book, it will have to have some poems by Linda Gregg in it." Already Gregg had attained a certain celebrity without having published a book, owing to a rumor that, returning from Greece where she lived with Jack Gilbert, she had submitted her first seven poems to the likes of The Atlantic, Antaeus, The New Yorker, The Nation, and so forth, and all had been accepted. For her fans, this winning luster has not diminished in the course of five collections, and as her base has grown, so has her official recognition, culminating in the PEN/Volker award for 2007.

Which is not to say her poems are not without their detractors. Some have mentioned a certain portentous and emotionally monotonous air surrounding the lyrics. Also to be heard have been the usual objections that accompany first-person free verse: sentimentality, über-subjectivity, and the ongoing attributions that may be laid at the altar of self: self-sacrifice, loneliness, a late willingness toward anonymity, paradoxically combined with the exceptionalism of destiny. Then there is the matter of the poet’s stylistic manner: all those conspicuous sentence fragments and participial phrases, a method used extensively by Gilbert beginning his first book Views of Jeopardy (1960). I concede a measure of truth to all these charges, but let's get them out of the way. To become distracted by such things in the presence of a talent this original is equivalent to having been thrown off by Berryman's syntax or the scything sweeps of Lowell's assertiveness. It is to miss an experience of the devotion of the other, indeed, to the Other. That there are solemn, even sacerdotal aspects to Gregg's poems is not to be denied, and these aspects, which are inclinations—at once psychological, emotional, and religious—find their source in Greek sensibility.

The mystery that we understand as metamorphosis comes down to the mystery of deciding how we encounter and bear discontinuity. It is the mystery that lies between Ovid and Rilke in their competing accounts of the myth of Orpheus. That myth first and foremost centers not merely on the bard's ability to conjure with his song, but on Eurydice's agreement (or reluctance) to allow herself to be turned back from death. It must be said at once that in the classical, "pious" version of this myth, Eurydice is given by Pluto to the poet as a consequence of the power of his song which, in Milton's phrase, "drew iron tears down Pluto's cheek." Moreover, in this version, she has not been dead long enough to turn her allegiance toward the mere materials out of which she is composed, and yet death, which renders her inertial, also allows her to harken toward a living, intrusive, mission-bound Orpheus. In Rilke's version, however, the cream has turned, and like any of the shades in Hades, she is more like a wisp of memory than a willful revenant. She is disoriented, easily led, clueless. This Eurydice adds a note of poignance to Orpheus' song because he must have been forced to undertake a private risk-benefit analysis in order to decide whether such a person was worth the extravagant audacity of his lyric at the epicenter of his harrowing.

The figure of Eurydice is central to Gregg's poetry because it includes the problematic of the return from death, which also includes the journey to the apogee of being, the border with its constantly pesky opposite, non-being; the decision to return, contra naturam toward life; the harnessing of death to love; the ne plus ultra of sacrifice, and other such questions worthy of mythic figures. Linda Gregg's Eurydice is a figure poised on the verge of metamorphosis but complicit with her return. She (somehow) manages it again and again, so that self-sacrifice becomes a mode of control. Here it might be instructive to remember Sylvia Plath's "I have done it again":

I was bred for slaughter, like the other
animals. To suffer exactly at the center
where there are no clues, except pleasure.
                          ("Whole and Without Blessing")

All of her best poems raise similar questions. For example, what does it mean for one to be a sacrifice? What is at stake, and what has she sacrificed in order to become herself? With what gods presiding? In Gregg's poems, not to make a sacrifice but to be one ups the ante because you are the thing you desire—or rather, because you want to sacrifice what you are in order to become who you are as an image. Thus self-sacrifice yields an excellent benefit: you gain a new identity. The opposite is also true:

What if the world is taken from me?
If there is no recognition? My words unheard?
                      ("What If the World Stays Always Far Off")

Reading the poems in chronological succession, one feels that, except for several forays into failed romance—themselves psychologically and spiritually resonant—and a few that meet and largely skirt the violence of politics, the succession of poems makes up a series of emanations from an original big bang. And what a bang it was. Consider the incandescence of "The Girl I Call Alma" from her first book, Too Bright to See:

The girl I call Alma who is so white
is good, isn't she? Even though she does not speak,
you can tell by her distress that she is
just like the breach and the sea, isn't she?

The sleeve-pulling urgency of these questions, these bits of reality-testing, hop up the poem to the point that its discontinuities and non-sequiturs become blurred out, leaving the crash that seems to have been the point all along:

And the white curtain, and the secret smile
are just her way with lies, aren't they?
And the we are not alone, ever.
And that everything is backwards

otherwise.

And that inside the no is the yes. Isn't it?
Isn't it?

If Too Bright to See announced a poet observing alarming quiddities from the middle of her life, her second book, Alma, sees from the sidelines: the poet has become her token, has incarnated her own projection. Never was Blake's dictum,"they became what they beheld," truer than in the difference between these books.

Gregg has not followed colloquial fashions, but aimed at a more neutral expressiveness, one capable of classically restrained (and yet passionate) utterance. How else, if passion, when all is dead and done, is your thing? Such an instrument is also capable of consorting with silence. Mediating the distance between that passionate utterance and the silence that is the context of any utterance is the figure of Alma, Gregg's avatar doll, double, and household goddess, a wounded but somehow transfigured female spirit whose shifting identity makes her nevertheless Gregg's foil through many of her early poems. This displaced subjectivity has its rewards. It takes the spotlight off the first person; it redistributes the ego's mission to a flatter, more mysterious bearer, one that comes with a whole different set of premises. We say, a doll? Is she serious? And she is—that is, the poet is serious enough to create a parallel world in which the scars, amputations, outrages, and worship opportunities become staged enactments, allowing expression that threatens to become too emotionally burdensome, otherwise:

When I go into the garden, there she is.
The specter holds up her arms to show
that her hands are eaten off.
She is silent because of the agony.

There is blood on her face.

—— I think
I am supposed to look. I am not supposed
to turn away. I am supposed to see each detail
and all expression gone. My God, I think,
if paradise is to be here
it will have to include her.
                          ("There She Is")

This is an address to a doll that takes place in a world where the gods too have shrunk to dolls, and she is their votaress. Originally appearing in Antaeus, this is one of the key poems that helped establish Gregg as a poet to watch. It had it all: pathos, the sway of authority, the feel of mystery, American passion and violence held in place by classical and modernist stanchions.

Taking seriously the contrast in figure-ground relationships is what enables Gregg to nail the early poems in Too Bright to See to the back wall of the reader's brain, where the work is weirdly reminiscent of Heidegger's discussions of being as a rising into the light in pre-Socratic philosophy. Sometimes, such constructions turn out to be all-too-literal, as in "The Beckett Kit," with its play of matchbox figures and the question of their placing and spatial relationship:

I finally found a way of using the tree.
If the man is lying down with the sheep
while the dog stands, then the wooden tree
can also stand, in the back, next to the dog.

The poem will remind readers of the trapped obsessive young wife of Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper," where the created thing remonstrates against the oppression of the given. Here the poet contrasts a controlled environment of arranged toys with the dangers of the city and by extension, with the fate of sincerity in the face of personal and historical violence, of hostility and cynicism:

The blacks probably do rape the whites in jail
as Bill said in the coffee shop watching the game
between Oakland and Cincinnati. And no doubt
Karl was right that we should have volunteered
as victims under the bombing of Hanoi.

A guy said to Mishkin, "If you've seen all that,
how can you go on saying you're happy?"

"A guy said to Mishkin . . ." is the kind of risky diction-mixing that, in the right hands, can raise the classical out of its grave and present it to consciousness as new, or it can merely indicate a failure of ear and control of verbal means. Gregg learned the difference.

Her early sublimity ironically derives from smallness rather than vastness, just as her later work derives power from self-sacrifice and acceptance, rather than emotional ostentation. Never was Carolyn Kizer's quip that "classicism is just romanticism without all the excess" more true and in evidence than in the work of Linda Gregg. Partly, the power of these early poems comes from the intuition that her first words are delivered in their final vocabulary form—i.e., there is no gainsaying the terms: meaning stops where the periods do and only silence trails its comet-tail after. She is a senex puella, for whom California and Mediterranean sun are one in the moment and the mile.

In "The Defeated," she writes, "It was like being alive twice." This declaration, the epigraph to two books (including the present one), is both apt and mysterious, even as praise. Eurydice of all people has to justify why it would be appropriate to be alive twice in a world that scarcely allows for being alive once. In "The Gods Must Not Know Us," she fears that "part of myself will get lost/ and I will not be a fitting gift." As for the worthiness of self-sacrifice: we start with the sacred, with respect. And yet, this poet's large ambition runs into difficulty, as she acknowledges in "What If the World Stays Always Far Off":

What if the world is taken from me?
If there is no recognition? My words unheard?
. . . .
What if I continue unnoticed

Invisibility is the subtext here, although virtue follows, as Whitman knew. But how can you reconcile, on one level, the wish to be invisible—the self-sacrifice—even if it is Whitmanian with the wish—the drive—to be visible and audible, indeed, to be Keats' nightingale singing "higher and higher to a screech"? In Eurydice's terms, how indeed to come back into "the world" becomes the question, always problematic, always minus the unconditioned embrace. The status of the pure and the unconditioned continues to exercise Gregg, for whom this impulse is subject to compromises both temporal and transcendent. In "Oedipus Exceeding," we find,

I have returned to mix my blood with our
earth. Mix myself with what we are not.
Something happened. Everything
was sacred.

Does self-sacrifice (added to sacrifice) also help to establish what we experience as the sacred? It seems as if we are being nudged toward affirmation, and yet, we have to consider that mixing "with what we are not" belies purity. It is as if Oedipus wants us to know that the pure and the sacred don't go together. But the self-exiled King of Thebes continues to signify because he takes that step that proffers the mixed as a catalyst toward the sacred. In the myth the gods, sure enough, recognize his sacred status. Our status, though supremely mixed, even divinely miscegenistic, is less clear. At the same time, we cannot deny that we are in the know about things. In "The Copperhead," Gregg addresses the issue of knowing versus being, which is central to whether we can ever be sacred:

Almost blind he takes the soft dying
into the muscle-hole of his haunting.
The huge jaws eyeing, the raised head sliding
back and forth, judging the exact place of his killing.

Those gerunds and participles here cycle the mindlessness of nature's red tooth. But they also show the world they describe with an equanimity that is as much the result of mind's removal as of its application and stabilization.

He takes the soft thing and coaxes it
away from his small knowing. He would turn in and
     follow,
hunt it deep within the dark hall of his fading
     knowing,
but he cannot. He knows that.
That he cannot go deep within his body for the
     finding
of the knowing. So he slows and lets go. And finds
with his eyes a moving. A small moving that he
     knows.

Are words themselves (and grammar) epistemological agents? How would one know? And yet there must be something that it is like to be a snake hunting and swallowing prey. And words get us plausibly within reach of what that is like—in the falling—which we can appreciate and in the "knowing," which is much more problematic. For what is it for a snake to know anything? And how does that knowledge relate to ours? The language of the poem has to be conducted quite differently to "fit" the snake and the knowing. One of the dangers of dealing with this kind of material is that it often seems like all-or-nothing choices only work. No alternatives. That limiting is both a strength and a narrowing. It's similar to the distinction between poet and bard, or the German distinction between Dichter and poet. George Steiner makes much of this distinction in discussing the difference between Continental and American notions of the poet. For one thing, the Dichter, like the snake, "object knows" what it knows aboriginally, without escalating, focus-dissolving abstractions.

In succeeding collections (The Sacraments of Desire, Chosen by the Lion, Things and Flesh and In the Middle Distance) Gregg turns to the darkness of the partisan and the national will, in war and the shadows of recent history, as much as to the Mediterranean light (from which she never really turns). She also records a doomed affair in her most personally freighted poems. We don't need to reread Freud to be reminded that the prerogatives of history are at odds with the prerogatives of the heart. Remembering her Akhmatova (she writes about her in a later poem), Gregg knows that insistence on prerogatives of the heart, often met with resistance and even disbelief, are one way for poetry to remind us that helplessless in the face of love is one of the sad proofs of our common bond. Yet like all great paradoxes, helplessness may be turned to account as a kind of strength. We find her aware of soldiers, marching to the center of historical events from which the poet is moving to the periphery, peripheries which, we suspect, will become new centers in their turn:

Maybe morality does change,
I was thinking, but suffering does not.

Are the claims of love the ultimate claims a person can make? Gregg asks the question in light of recent history: you are aware of the non-simpatico types lining the streets where you wander forlorn, both of you exilic: the one interior, one other, exterior. Their exile is the only thing you have common between you. "The War," "Night Music," "The Foreign language of the Heart" also contain images of people either looking the other way, or simply not acknowledging presence, as if humanity consisted of layers of incommensurable people who only share a common fealty in that they are on their way to becoming "[t]he dead in layers."

In "The Ninth Dawn," which opens Chosen by the Lion, Gregg steps back and considers her themes from the perspective, the "place to stand," as Jack Gilbert has it, of a life lived under the sky of classical austerities:

It is not for nothing we notice a wider theme
in Virgil's Georgics when he speaks about
the passion of Orpheus and Eurydice. The gods
want the honey in the hive, are willing to have
the lovers destroyed.
I am haunted by Eurydice
who merely went too far into the wood and after
lived with the darkness around her forever.
The gods instruct us to cut
the throats of eight beasts, throw in poppies,
kill the jet-black ewe in the beautiful Italian

light so the bees, who have been the real business
all along, will swarm out again under the pliant
     boughs.

In this signal poem, not only the bees are pure Virgilian: so is the form. Everything about this poem looks backward to that symbol of our cultural continuity and forward to our diminishment. Just so, the bees are 'the business all along," the vibrant and constant process that uses and justifies (if justification were ever needed) of light. When lovers heat up, they disturb this business, which is not a social or cultural business, but a "natural" one (i.e, and unthinking one, one conducted regardless). It is this move toward naturalism that is at the heart of her later poems. In these poems, self-sacrifice goes by another name, one denuded of the prefix "self." You can sense the iciness of acceptance, but the reward no longer belongs to (or is withheld from) the poet, but belongs to the poem and to the art.

All of It Singing is a beautiful and substantial book that sings of a fruitful life with a sustained degree of ardor and courage not usually on show. There are at least ten poems here I know by heart, and others I will remember as long as I live. They are a part of me, and I would hope they could be a part of anyone who has followed me this far. Can I break into more unguarded praise?