Eric Ormsby's Onomatopoetics

Eric Ormsby's Onomatopoetics Eric Ormsby. Araby. Signal Editions, Vehicule Press 2001. 75 pp. $12.00 (paper) Eric Ormsby. Daybreak at the Straits and Other Poems. Zoo Press 2004. 62 pp. $14.95 (paper) Eric Ormsby. Facsimiles of Time: Essays on Poetry and Translation. The Porcupines Quill 2001. 252 pp. $22.95 (paper) Eric Ormsby. For a Modest God: New and Selected Poems. Grove Press 1997. 139 pp. $20.00 Hearing how poets talk about other poets can be revealing, sometimes of the poet under discussion, more often of the one doing the talking. Wallace Stevens' famous quip on Frost-His work is full (or said to be full) of humanity-says loads about Stevens' own mandarin sensibility (one can imagine him similarly sniffing at the humanity in Wordsworth or Whitman), while Frost on virtually anyone reflects, pretty exclusively, Frost. Poets either see failed versions of themselves in other poets, or else recognize the qualities they admire, and so substantiate themselves. Yet the relationship need not be self-serving, skewed, or mean. Just so, Eric Ormsby's reflections on Marianne Moore in the following passage are attuned to the essential strangeness of their subject, even as they shed light on Ormsby himself-and all this by way of a crustacean: The hermit crab is imposing yet fatally shy, housed as she is within a tottering armature of borrowed chitin. At times a forceful claw emerges, and then, from behind the claw, two small, glittering eyestalks appear. Some hermit crabs-say, Pagurus pollicaris-are squatters in moon shells and in whelks; one of their most striking characteristics is to adorn such otherwise nondescript shells with incrustations. In reading through this massive selection of Marianne Moore's letters, I was often reminded-sometimes by a stinging swipe of claw, at others by a delicate, scuttling retreat, but always by sheer brilliance of embellishment-of how genuinely strange, seemingly unknowable, and altogether this great poet was during her long lifetime, and of how she remains, a quarter-century after her death. Noteworthy here is not so much that the hermit crab carries us to Moore, in a surprisingly apt figure-had we considered this poet's crab-like qualities before? and how right that word carapaced feels-but that the crab seems for Ormsby a suitable end in itself. His delight in description, his eye for detail and adornment, his relish in sound-tottering armature, eccentric incrustations-are everywhere apparent. Only midway though the passage does Moore herself, the paragraph's ostensible occasion, scuttle forth as a kind of afterthought. For the past twenty years, Ormsby has been writing poems that are, like this passage, keenly observed and delicately adorned endsin-themselves. As with his connection here of crab and Moore, they take the reader into unexpected territory and forge links that feel, once one thinks about them, exactly right. His style has justly been compared to Stevens', in its rococo curlicues and crisp cerebral air, but Ormsby generally avoids the aesthetic-philosophical bent of Stevens, opting more for the empiricist's strict mimetic mode. And though one detects the influence of flashier, more geniuses such as Hart Crane and Hopkins, more often in Ormsby one feels the presence of steadier, soberer wordsmiths such as Donald Justice-solidly good, tempered by principle-with a ruminative dose of Wordsworth or Frost tossed in, for humanity. Ormsby struck the ruminative note early on, particularly in the poems from his 1992 collection, Coastlines. Poems of the poet's Florida childhood-My First Beach, Remembrance, Fragrances-cast a warm nostalgic air, while others-Highway Grasses, Savannahs-chart the journey north to Canada, where Ormsby lived for many years. (He recently moved to London.) Along the way, there are poems of rich attention to the natural and animal worlds-Live Oak, with Bromeliads, Horseshoe Crab, Crackle-that display the eye and ear for which he has become known. …

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