Poetry and the Sense of Panic: Critical Essays on Elizabeth Bishop and John Ashbery by Lionel Kelly (review)

MLR, 97.4, 2002 949 throughout Faulkner's work. Yet a furtherdanger is that the cross-lights of reference suggest a kind of atemporal psychic echo-chamber, or (in a favourite analogy here) cinema, where shadows of real-life relationships, actual and possible, interplay in end? less variations. As a description of the eflects of many of the fictions (The Marionettes or the Ur-Sanctuary, for example), this is persuasive, but seems less helpful when it colours the critical method. Although Watson's agility with allusion can be dazzling, at times, in this book, it seems as ifany moment or experience can be linked with any other, in any order. A reference to Darl Bundren spins into Faulkner's 1918 letters from New Haven and Toronto, which in turn elide with a discussion of Quentin's Harvard rooms in Absalom, Absalom!: 'Clearly, as the lack of concrete geographical detail about Cambridge suggests, Quentin's Harvard is Faulkner's Yale' (p. 61). At such points, Watson sometimes falls over-insistently into helping a connection on its way: 'he must surely have discussed [. . .] he must likewise have told [. . .] it is hard to think the scene he described was anything except another performance for his parents?a performance, not incidentally, that recalls Quentin's being taken for a Canadian in The Sound and the Fury" (p. 61). Although Watson is alert to Faulkner's own 'grand narratives', his book actually underpins them. In his preface Watson pays tribute to Faulknerians who share his own interest in Faulkner's 'work', rather than in 'theoretical configurations spun from it' (p. xv). It is often hard to see how Watson draws the line, and why he omits some critics rather than others (given his interest in the supreme self-reflexive display of the Reverend Shegog's voice, why, for example, no Stephen M. Ross?). His purpose seems to be to recover a sense of plenitude in an author feltto have been lost in all the speculation. Turning to his own biographical ends John T. Matthews' fine-tuning of historical materialism, Watson revives authorial presence, the 'undisguised self of the author', even if now glimpsed only in symptomatic readings of the points of textual contradiction. In the references to ever earlier letters,to manuscript revisions, to interviews with the real-life actors, his study itself performs an act of retrieval, returning the reader to a vision of 'an antecedent whole' in 'the "pieces of broken mirror"' (p. 5), and reaffirmingFaulkner as Melville's 'weaver-god' (p. 205), or in the writer's own self-casting, as the sovereign 'Old Moster' himself. University of Durham Pamela Knights Poetry and the Sense of Panic: Critical Essays on Elizabeth Bishop and John Ashbery. Ed. by Lionel Kelly. (Costerus New Series, 124) Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. 2000. v+192 pp. Hfl.75;$32. In his introduction to this collection Lionel Kelly states that the essays were originally papers given at a conference at the University of Reading in 1996. His brief mention of their origin seems unnecessarily truncated; certainly,it would have been interesting to know more about the conference. In fact, some of the most impressive aspects of this collection may be seen to derive from its conference origin. The distinguished contributors all write in a lively,engaging manner and convey an attractive immediacy ofcontact with their subject. Even where the ideas ofthe contributors are familiar from their other writings, as in the cases of Thomas Travisano, Geoff Ward, and Joanne Feit Diehl, there is an appealing freshness about the essays. Without exception, all thirteen are well focused and stimulating, opening up many lines of thought. There is a notable engagement with individual poems (especially welcome when dealing with two poets who so richly repay close reading) and a generous amount of quotation. This was an enjoyable book to read and can be recommended to undergraduates. The title is potentially misleading, suggesting much more thematic coherence among the essays than is actually apparent, and implying a comparative study of 950 Reviews the two poets. The essays range far more widely than the titular subject would sug? gest. Certainly, panic is referred to in some of the essays, notably in...

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