rev. of Hush by David St. John

In
Hush, by David St. John, we see a conscious movement away from the lyrical voice, to a simpler, more prose-like form. This tendency in poetry is at least sixty years old now, if we trace it to the Imagist school, and much older and more universal if we consider the efforts at plain speech made by Wordsworth and Blake, and at plain style made by Milton and Herbert, or even by the medieval lyricists. Unfortunately, in the hands of artists of this tendency who are less gifted than those just mentioned, the non-lyrical voice can become minimal and almost non-verbal. Language fails, and without it, the poetry becomes abstract and unconnected to the experience or sentiment it tries to embody.

David St. John's poems occasionally approach that non-communicative state. In a poem called enigmatically "Endless Letter to South Bay," the lines are brief, with eccentric details:

Dear G,

each new line

dangles from my teeth

like a black string.

My words disappear,

like gravel

tossed in a lake --

And these words do seem to disappear, their meaning and context indistinct and unmemorable. In another poem entitled "six/nine/forty-four," a slightly surreal, harsh, prosey, stream of consciousness tone takes over:

his whore flips off a taxi driver & pukes,

& refuses tea. She says, Ice cream. . .

Yet, in other poems in this collection, quiet simplicity can be lyrical in itself, and great beauty is achieved. My favorite is the title poem, "Hush," addressed to a lost son. Here intense human grief is controlled and contained in the short, strong words. "Nothing stops it, this crying," he says, and this simple, moving statement is the only direct allusion to the pain:

Nights

Return you to me for a while, as sleep returns sleep

To a landscape ravaged

& familiar. The dark watermark of your absence, a hush.