Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 24, 1991 TAG: 9102270023
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by FRED CHAPPELL
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The use of dream in poetry is ancient. Homer's warriors were visited in dreams by gods who imparted sometimes puzzling information to them. Chaucer employed dreams as settings for his allegories. Shakespeare's doomed monarchs learned their futures from dreams.
But these are conventions, cheerfully accepted by readers as being literary in intention and as having little to do with the kind of dreams that actually come to uneasy sleepers.
Every generation of poets finds a new use for dreams and in our decades they have mostly been used as pretexts for writing surrealistic verse, lines that attempt by means of illogic to free themselves from the cold weight of factuality. When a contemporary poet wishes to write fantasy or whimsy, he is likely to turn to the convention of the dream.
But in Dabney Stuart's absorbing new collection, "Narcissus Dreaming," the form is used for more than pretext. Here are poems that render the sensations of the dream experience, that are both accurate in presentation and at the same time thematically searching in the traditional literary manner.
A good example of Stuart's method is "Knowledge Is Power," a poem beginning with these lines: "My mother the judge keeps/ her cigar going while the angels/ of birth appeal for me." The sudden presentation of the situation gives the reader a tipsy dislocated feeling; the poem plunges immediately into a complex of odd event and ominous atmosphere. The speaker's mother is a judge whose cigar marks her gender with ambiguity and her demeanor with vague threat.
The "angels of birth" serve as attorneys, pleading for the judge to allow her child - who is the speaker of the poem - to be born. As the poem proceeds we watch the judge's cigar ash lengthen for 40 years while the angels' pleas fade to silence and the angels become transfixed. At last the verdict against the speaker is postponed and this relief gives him "sweet pleasure," and he begins to applaud. "I clap for everything - my old lady,/ her strenuous inertia, the heavenly/ chorus stunned in tableau with her, my/ self standing there clapping,/ releasing - everything." Then the speaker realizes that it has required his whole past lifetime for him to enjoy this feeling of liberation as he turns away to pursue a future whose contours he cannot yet imagine.
The thematic intentions of the poem are clear: if the existence of the speaker is not judged worthy, neither is it found unworthy by the judge who is both mother and father. The suspension of the verdict gives him freedom to shape his life in a fresh adventurous way; the future lies invitingly before him.
There are innumerable poems that take up the theme of the renewed life, "fresh woods and pastures new." But Stuart's use of the dream setting reinforces the emotions of the poem partly because it blurs the poems themes. The central situation - the mother as judge - remains unexplained; the appearance of the angels is not described until they transform into a "kind of choir" with mouths "the shape of zeroes." We are not told why a suspended verdict brings such happiness to the speaker. And because so much is left mysterious, the poem is convincing as a dream experience.
It is all the more valuable because of that. We are all dreamers and we know that dreams being messages important to our well being. Yet we know too that when we begin to decipher our dreams and to analyze them logically, the true import eludes us, the dream message reduces to bald homiletic or a trivial germ of memory. The real import is the dreamed experience itself.
Dabney Stuart renders the feeling of the dream experience vividly and convincingly. This is a task difficult to accomplish because so much of a dream experience is nonverbal in nature. But Stuart is equal to his ambition. He makes strange images look inevitable and familiar sights look alien; he captures complex emotional dramas with an economic minimum of strokes.
And not just in "Knowledge Is Power," which is actually one of the lesser poems in this fine book, but in almost all the others too. The book seems so purely a product of a seamless vision that it is hard for me to choose favorites, but I would recommend "The Other Woman," "Surface Tension," "Swinging on the First Pitch," "Gospel Singer," "The Secret," "The Next Step" and a good dozen others to the reader. My most favorite may be "A Bird" but I recognize that "The Harpist's Dream" is close to being a masterpiece.
On no page does "Narcissus Dreaming" go wrong. This is simply wonderful poetry; it is good, it is true, it is beautiful.
by CNB