BOO KS
139
of animate and inanimate, and mad images of self-alienation or of go–
ing through the looking glass assail us:
The quietest thought of all stood in the pale
Watery light alone, and was no more
My own than the speckled trout I stare upon
All but unseeing.
. . .
Until this trout
Pokes through the fabric of the surface to
Snap up a fly. As if a man's own eyes
Raised welts upon the mirror whence they stared.
It is rare to find so uncompromising a first book as Mr. Feinman's.
Preambles
comes at one like a clenched fist, the old emblem for logic,
instead of like an extended hand, the emblem for eloquence. Yet the
logic of this poetry is still that of speech in a peculiar and important
way.
It
belongs to speech in its essence, to the faculty of speech itself
rather than, like grammar or rhetoric, to language and particular
speech-acts.
If
we reduce lyrical expression
to
its simplest forms we arrive at
such basic speech gestures as invocation,
cry,
lament and praise. At
an
even more abstract or interior level there is the
voice
of the word
or the
inscape
of speech. Rilke wondered whether the human voice did
not have its own plot, an intentionality impeded by those secondary
intentions we call meanings. The voice breaks at adolescence, and we
can imagine a deeper, spiritual breaking, which stands to the first as
the inscape of speech to speech. Why tap this vein, why invade this
indistinct and shadowy land? The reason is-at least the reason of
Preambles-that
speech is phenomenal, and that like all phenomena
it has a presence (not necessarily a thing-like presence) which de–
mands respect for itself "as is": "Nothing here resolve/ To less than
that these are."
If,
moreover, that inward presence (or
intentionality)
of
speech is not heeded, there is little chance of heeding the outward
presence (or
phenomenality)
of things. In this respect at least the world
is made in the image of the word. And what Mr. Feinman's poetry
yields most immediately is a genuine sense of both presences: of the
intentionality of words in their uncanceled relation to the phenomenality
of
things:
Vagrant, back, my scrutinies
The candid d,eformations as with use
A coat or trousers of one now dead
Or as habit smacks of certitude
