Nothing Remains Poem by gershon hepner

Nothing Remains



NOTHING REMAINS


The derelict detritus of derangement
of feelings that defy, without dissolving,
nothing remains of love except estrangement
that sometimes leads to hatred by evolving,
sentenced without pardon by cruel time
and entropy which are the primal curse
that cannot be resolved by prose or rhyme,
raw as the raw material of this verse,
but in the evolution process may
survive so altered in its form and shape
that links to love within its resumé
are more obscure than those of man to ape.

William Logan reviews Louise Glück’s “A Village Life” in the NYT Book Review, August 30,2009:
Even before the unknown versifier of Isaiah, poets probably looked at a lush meadow and saw a graveyard. Louise Glück’s wary, pinch-mouthed poems have long represented the logical outcome of a certain strain of confessional verse — starved of adjectives, thinned to a nervous set of verbs, intense almost past bearing, her poems have been dark, damaged and difficult to avert your gaze from. Poets, being creatures of routine, tend to settle into a style sometime in their 30s and plow those acres as if they’d been cleared by their fathers’ fathers’ fathers. Read a poet’s second or third book and you will see the style of his dotage. Poets restless in their forms, unwilling to take yesterday’s truth as gospel, are as rare as a blue rose; and rarer still are poets like Eliot, Lowell and Geoffrey Hill, who have convincingly changed their styles midcareer….
Glück’s world is as close to Darwinian savagery as any a poet has invented (her psyche red in tooth and claw) , but it would be a mistake not to see how vulnerable she is beneath her brutal observations. A poem about a mother trying to tell her daughter the facts of life is full of mortifying embarrassment — mother gives daughter one of those insufferable books that make sex harder to follow than instructions for assembling a bicycle.
Whatever holds human beings together
could hardly resemble those cool black-and-white diagrams, which suggested,
among other things, that you could only achieve pleasure
with a person of the opposite sex,
so you didn’t get two sockets, say, and no plug.
The terrible need not to lie to herself (“Nothing remains of love, ” Glück says darkly, “only estrangement and hatred”) forces the poet to rehearse the old tales to see where the disaster began. Glück is perhaps the most popular literary poet in America. She doesn’t have the audience of Mary Oliver or Billy Collins, whose books rise to the top of the poetry best-seller list (even poets are surprised to learn there is one) and stay there, as if they had taken out a long-term lease. Glück is too private and cunning a poet ever to win too many friends — indeed, part of her cachet is that her poems are like secret messages for the initiated.


8/30/09

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