Here's a review of an interesting collection you may not know about:
Charles W. Pratt, From
the Box Marked Some Are Missing: New and Selected Poems. Brookline NH:
Hobblebush Books, 2010. (www.hobblebush.com)
The opening poems, and many
subsequent ones, in Charles Pratt’s new and selected poems reprise the voice,
topics, and arguably the point of view of Robert Frost. “In the Woods” echoes
parts of “The Wood-Pile,” “Learning to Prune” and “Spray and Pray” obliquely
echo “After Apple-Picking” and “Good-Bye and Keep Cold,” and “Stones”
reverberates with many of the poems in A
Boy’s Will. Perhaps most startlingly, “May 15,” a much more recent poem,
touches upon several of Frost’s early lyric poems and revisits one of his
central themes, the question of whether the universe is an act of deliberation:
The time has come to revise
Line by line by line
The rough draft of my field
Till down the green grass lies
Obedient to design
And the lovely scruffy tufts
Of flowers, they too, must yield.
But it
would be a mistake to think of Pratt as merely a minor ephebe of a great poet.
His poems come out of experience as well as imagination, out of actual farm
work (in his case, an orchard) as well as out of reading Frost, George Herbert,
and other poets important to him. He seized upon Frost not just as a congenial
voice but as a body of experience comparable to his own efforts to support
himself as an apple-grower in New Hampshire. He has grown through Frost, and
has not let himself be stunted by influence. Many of his best poems—such as “O
Say Can You See”—resemble the work of no one else:
Tonight the whole neighborhood
gathered for the first night game
In the history of Thomas Tree
stadium, brothers and sisters,
Parents, grandparents; hands over
hearts we sang
“The Star-Spangled banner,”
faltering only in places
Then played nine innings of
laughter and arguments
With an umpire whose allegiance was
transparently not to truth
But to beautiful symmetry, a tie
game to the end.
These loose-limbed but graceful long lines are not his only
resource. He produces an almost perfect sonnet (although it’s really only
twelve lines) in “Band Concert in Regent’s Park” with its wonderful evocation
of the Titanic concluding with “Why should we try to keep the ship afloat /
Except for the pleasure of hearing the final note?” And in “Whatever it Was” he
displays an enviable ear for the terser sort of free verse:
How she moved, moved, moved behind
the counter,
Wiping it over and over
“To keep myself awake,” she said.
Pratt’s resources are not only prosodic, however. Poems like
“Refuting Berkeley” display an ability to bring to bear the history of ideas on
the present moment. Here the voice of the intellect crosscuts the voice of
personal sentiment as the speaker observes his freshly born child, then muses
on Johnson’s clumsy but dramatic refutation of Berkeley’s idealism. Although
the poem ends with a self-effacement that precludes it from seeming showy, it
illustrates Pratt’s cultural resources, which he handles effectively and in a
different way from Frost, Yeats, Herbert, and other predecessors. Thoughtful
beyond the abilities of many of his contemporaries, frankly indebted to some
giants of the past, Pratt continues the great conversation of poetry in ways we
as readers should honor and trust.
