rev. of The Ether Dome and Other Poems by Allen Grossman

The vatic voice requires that a poet believe in both the gods and in posterity, which explains its virtual absence from American letters after the annihilations of World War II. With their lyricism, passion, and irony, Allen Grossman's poems for the millennium, together with work collected from three previous volumes, fashion such a voice for the postmodern world, where pain's gift is not wisdom but anaesthesia, and Mind -- ". . . the Mind whom I so deeply love,/The poem of every man and woman who has ever lived" -- wanders the dark, bearing witness in solitude.

As philosophers return to the question, "What is the good?" Grossman inquires throughout
The Ether Dome into the nature of holiness, affirming, "There is as much. . .now as there ever was," and locating it "in the faces of men and women/In their multitudes, each one subject of prophency." Not mortal stink but the fragrant capacity for love haloes human presence. But love's intentions, like the Lord's, are mysterious. Parents deny their only child in "Poland of Death"; the speaker in "Pat's Poem" confesses, "Because of you I cannot/tie good knots./. . .I weep at marching bands/. . .cannot depart/From any shallow friend, tell truth, keep measure," yet, "All my life long I will remember you." Love, like the poet's song, gives countenance to souls otherwise forgotten, redeeming from eternity their mortal cry, "
This happened to me!" Grossman's great skill and power invite the reader, at such transfiguring moments, to discover in ordinary events -- falling in love at a party, noticing a lover's cotton nightgown -- the immanence of myth. If the role of the vates is to place the tongue of God into the ear of man, Allen Grossman has succeeded brilliantly with
The Ether Dome.