The Old World in His Arms: Collected Poems

This volume showcases the life work of someone X.J. Kennedy has called a major poet commanding in his mastery. Excelling in both lyric and narrative modes Jonathan Aldrichs poems from the 1960s and 70s seem fresh today. At the start his voice was authoritative lively and unpretentious his language both sensual and thoughtful. Aldrichs later poetry deepens his style and continues his engagement with themes such as the meaning of time and our responsibility to the past. This collected poems reprints in full the detective narrative Wades Wait along with generous selections from other books including his extended lyrical sequence The Ring Road. It also gives us two long poems for the first time: Tivoli and Owed to Finnegans Wake. The final section New and Selected draws mainly from his last books and unpublished late poems poetry that reveals a writer involved in the lives of family and friends generally hopeful but sometimes reflecting on the fragility of our human world. Although Aldrich composed in many moods his earliest published poem may stand as a demonstration of his ability to convey the drama of everyday life in language that speeds the mind forward. Using terms from the at times surprisingly violent lawn game croquet he helps us experience a moment of social confusion one that many writers know well.CROQUET LOVER AT THE DINNER TABLE(at a Writers Conference)She passes muffins orders the most remoteand sudden relishes comments onthe one particular poem you meant to keepentirely undiscussed or interruptsyour train of silence with a stabof curiosity on what you planto do next year if love or money wontcome through as if it were a gameto find you out: to slam you out of court to rout the field dislodge the set-up shot provoke your aim suggest a change of rulesuntil you feel immeasurably behindbecause her eyes are never wicketed dead on nobody and poison to the last. Again and again in his poetry Aldrich takes us to a familiar world suddenly illuminated in an unfamiliar light. In his early short sequence A Shaker Girl (c. 1850) he shows us the youthful struggles of a girl living a simple life in a Shaker village. Walking Home surely among the most striking sestinas ever composed is a quiet meditation on social belonging and spiritual risk. The setting is foreign to us but the internal tension in the girls narration is thoroughly recognizable.It isnt possible to speak of an immature stage in Aldrichs development as a publishing poet. The later poems do however broaden the scope of imaginative concern tending to treat of whole lives rather than moments. Wades Wait is a series of detective adventures but it is also an assessment of Wades life--or of three lives as the third section (Pool Shot) is presented from the perspective of a man who has developed into Wades secret enemy and the fourth (The Shade Trees) from that of Wades wife in the months prior to their engagement. In The Ring Road and Foam Aldrich turns his attention to the details of his own life. With the perspicacity of a haiku artist he finds meaning and amusement in scenes that seem to come back to him in a flash. Underneath this specificity--even in his treatment of Ted the unlikable anti-hero of the long Pushkinian near-satire Tivoli--we sense the upswell of Aldrichs love of life. The final section of that poem is as open-hearted a vision as any crafty poet has devised. Here as elsewhere Aldrichs wisdom is at one with his joy.