BOOK REVIEWS
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a class by himself: only the pragmatists (Peirce, James, Dewey, Holmes) share
his world-view, but they wrote in a different idiom. So did Stephen J. Gould,
whose multiple muses include Simon Rodia and Frank Capra, but no poets, save
for those who work on stone or screen. There’s also Robinson Jeffers—but his
moody, pagan naturalism is idolatrous, not reverential, and he embraces death as
a warrior, not as a lover, much less a healer. He is a loner, as well as a solipsist.
The same is true of Hart Crane, who makes technology a demon, or Satan, the
cause of our downfall. (Crane’s suicide was both literal and figurative
fulfillment of his bridge-prophecies). These poets have a metaphysics, but it is
neither redemptive nor cathartic; their ashes prefigure our own. Whereas, for
Talarico there is permanence as well as flux; continuity of form, as well as
material decay. The species survive and transcend themselves; the individual
perishes and leaves only a trace of selfhood behind. That trace is embodied in
speech, in ritual (“the dark passage of ceremony”), and in the process of life
itself (“the water should flow forever”), with its endless “equation” of death
with renewal. Unlike (say) Robert Penn Warren, for whom history (“a usable
past,” to quote Warren, quoting Bernard DeVoto) is always about what we do,
suffer and endure, for Talarico there is solace simply in glimpsing or beholding
eternity, even though we play no part in it. The world IS, and it goes on
(forever) without us—and it is good.
That is the gospel according to Ross—or the testament of the rocks, what
Malraux would call the voices of silence—how eloquently they whisper, in
millennia of stratified soil. That’s the undiscovered country that makes
Talarico’s poems worth the risk of exploring. There’s no room for narcissism
here, nor for trees that don’t make a sound without being heard, or videotaped
for posterity. Maybe that’s why Talarico isn’t your Edenic-variety bard; he
doesn’t contemplate his navel, much less insist that the world (or our sinfully
aggrieved consciousness) must revolve around it. And that’s the ethical side of
it, the part that really matters. Talarico acknowledges his own responsibility (“I
am a killer . . . I’m an artist too”), but doesn’t magnify or overdo it. He doesn’t
wallow in self- pity or sentimentality, nor does he claim to be our savior, or to
have all the answers. Like Whitman, from whom he ultimately descends, he can
see and be the soulful Universal I, without wallowing in phony magic. Like
King Lear, he can demonstrate differences, as well as similarities, between
crises and the routine emergencies we must constantly confront. Hence he does
not offer a formula to eliminate alienation or (conversely) to create community.
(In this respect he is unlike Muriel Rukeyser, who dedicated her art to politics,
and politics to art, thus sublimating her own alienation while out-Brechting
Brecht). He knows that “life must go on” even though there’s no reason why it
should, except for its own sake. Hence it is always “a question mark” and
therefore tragic. Yet Hamlet’s salvation lay in asking questions, for which only
the questions themselves were the answer.