The Thread

reviewed by David Yezzi

published in Poetry, June 1999

The Thread: New and Selected Poems, by Stephen Sandy. Louisiana State University Press. $24.95 cloth; $19.95 paper.

At the wedding in Cana, the governor of the feast asks the bridegroom why he has saved his most delicious wine for last. With Stephen Sandy's new and selected poems, such progressive excellence is less of a mystery. Marked by increasing
skill and affective force, Sandy's work has achieved, over three decades, the depth and robustness of an outstanding vintage-not by some miracle, but through slow and deliberate labor. Few poets spring to life fully formed, after all, and, as the five previous volumes sampled here attest, Sandy has made good on the promise of his initial books, following them with an irascible, brooding maturity. While Sandy has long mined a formalist vein, he has not, like many poets, arrived quickly at a set mode and then ossified. From Stresses in the Peaceable Kingdom (1967) to the new poems printed here as American Days, he has worked through a variety of styles and forms and subjects, achieving with his more recent collections his greatest authority of voice and suppleness of technique.

The many accomplished poems that appear early in The Thread are more remarkable for their numerous strengths than as examples of Sandy's finest work. Describing the behavior of water fowl in "Wild Ducks," the opening poem of the collection, Sandy provides a taste of the extreme economy that marks his work throughout (sometimes to a fault): "Sedate, / intent; bills front, they form / a V unmoving as kites." The compression works both syntactically and sonically, t's tripping across the enjambed lines from "sedate" to "kites." Not all of Sandy's early poems feature this same lightness of touch. The downside of his baroque sensibility becomes apparent in passages of excessive density such as this one from "Watersheds": "The upper lake, by its / convulsing trickle / fell, the packing culvert's torsions heaved white / water crumbling, and hourly became / the lower lake." THe torsion of these lines may mimic the movements of water, but this kind of linguistic imitation of the subject strikes me as a lesser effect, especially when it impedes clarity. To his credit, the description is a near miss and Sandy's attempt to froth the language admirable, if not wholly successful.

To my mind, the best poems come in the second half of the book. Despite a syntactically rocky opening and an excess of tropes ("floppy discs of memory," etc.), "The Tack" manages an impressive tour de force. In it, Sandy weaves gainfully together such diverse elements as a bloody bug bite, a spelunking S.T. Coleridge, a beggar on a city subway, and the convex self-portrait of the speaker as seen on the head of a thumbtack. Ruminations on an Asian tableau in "A Bamboo Brushpot," reminiscent of Yeats's "Lapis Lazuli," lead to their own grand conclusions (where Yeats finds gaiety, Sandy arrives at stoicism). Carved on the brushpot is an image of the emperor Xie An playing chess as his lands are attacked. Sandy envies the ruler his calm in the face of adversity: "Greet squalid terror with solidity," the scene councils, "And the cloudy invader with such deliberate cool / As showed an old man's skeptic mastery." Elsewhere, Sandy makes plain his debt to another skeptical master, Robert Frost—not only in an excellent anecdotal poem on Frost ("Place and Fame"), but also in his narrative "The White Oak of Eagle Bridge." The poem's easy tone nonetheless incorporates masterly flourishes of rich diction and highly wrought sentence structure, over which Sandy maintains complete control. His work has long exhibited a robust relationship to form that lends his lines considerable vitality. He is unafraid of the hieratic, of size and songlike utterance. Yet, even with so much to admire here, no single piece attains the perfection of, say, Wilbur's "Mind-Reader" or Hecht's "Feast of Stephen," poems close to Sandy's own sensibility. Still, his finest work can hold its head up in such company.