The scope and seriousness of Leviston’s second book invite comparison with Elizabeth Bishop and Richard Wilbur
What do we think we know, and how, and what are we to make of it? In contemporary poetry such questions are readily to hand, but they are perhaps less often raised than taken for granted, commonplaces of postmodernity, with concomitant risks of complacency and sentimentality. Frances Leviston’s widely admired 2007 debut Public Dream showed a poet eager for challenges. What makes the best poems in Disinformation bracing and exciting is that she has further developed the power of inquiry. Poetry for her is a mode of knowledge rather than a proverbial response to a case already closed. In this Leviston draws on the inheritance of the female line in American modernism, on Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop– poets to whom things were interesting in themselves, and on whom little was lost, and whose idea of order was inclusive.
Disinformation is particularly interesting when Leviston writes about the classical world, or what’s left of it, in which so many of our concerns were shaped. “Propylaea” visits the gateway of the Acropolis, “properly / the gate before the gate, / the entrance before the entrance, / a huge tautology // made of marble / and the old ambition / to be understood in a certain way”. Leading the reader through the gate, Leviston moves steadily towards an ambiguous grandeur. We “can feel our own // ambitions recede / then colossally resurge, / partial and imposing like the gate / before the gate, // hinged on nothing”. There is an undertow from Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses” here, but also the vertiginous comedy of William Empson’s “Homage to the British Museum” and James Fenton’s “The Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford”, poems where worldly irony proves not to offer a way out of the building. Nearby, “Athenaeum” warns: “If you fall asleep in a temple, be prepared / to wake with your ear licked clean as a conch / and the statements of the gods / suddenly cold and clear to you, suddenly a cinch” and yet, for all the isolating danger of such knowledge, the poem also invokes Minerva, goddess of wisdom: “guard our sororities that know / no better; shed blessings as we pass”.
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