From Publishers Weekly
In a few provocative pages, Harvard professor and author of the NBCC winner Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets, once again demonstrates her talent for smart and sympathetic reading of poetry. She looks at four poets and their particular uses of a donnee (meaning theme but derived from the "given" of the title): for Robert Lowell, it is the persistent drive of history; for John Berryman, the mischievous and frightening id; for Rita Dove, the color of her skin; for the trilingual Jorie Graham, the problem of translating thought into language, into phenomenon. Almost all of the chapter on Berryman is devoted to his brilliant, funny and disturbing Dream Songs, while in Dove, Vendler follows differing, equally intriguing manipulations of her theme from "Parsley" to Thomas and Beulah and Grace Notes. Perhaps most interesting, because personal and poetical are so vividly intertwined, is her examination of Lowell. Vendler carefully outlines his changing interaction with history and its effect on his style, from the often overwrought public historical passions of The Mills of the Kavanaughs and the more intimate history and form that followed his parents' deaths and his own bout with manic depression. Although she occasionally gives in to the lure of such words as victimage and necessitarian, which tend to reflect dully on her usually lucid style, it's a small thing in her subtle, beguiling essays. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From The Boston Review
In an era when theory has often distracted us from literature, Helen Vendler reminds us that poems, themselves, repay close attention. Her two most recent books insist on the importance of poetry's "material body." Both collections, which include essays on John Berryman, Rita Dove, Seamus Heaney, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Jorie Graham, contend that how a poem is written is at least as important as what it says. Vendler maintains that style is not only a matter of technique or expressive means, but has moral, political, and psychological implications which are missed if readers merely seek to decode a poem's "message." The Given and the Made analyzes the "existential givens" which shape a poet's style. Jorie Graham's "trilingualism in American English, Italian and French," for instance, activates her poetry's restless "trying-on of several different linguistic expressions for the `same thing' -- as though language itself offered no perfect match for the material world." Thus Graham's poem, "I Was Taught Three," is emblematic of her predicament: "I was taught three/names for the tree facing my window . . . / Castagno . . . /Chassagne . . . / And then chestnut." Like the other poets Vendler discusses, Graham must cut her words from the cloth her individual necessity provides. Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

How does a poet repeatedly over a lifetime make art out of an arbitrary assignment of fate? By asking this question of the work of four American poets - two men of the postwar generation, two young women writing today - Helen Vendler suggests a fruitful way of looking at a poet's career and a new way of understanding poetic strategies as both mastery of forms and forms of mastery.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly