Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, May 27, 1990                   TAG: 9006010009
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: F-5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Reviewed by FRED CHAPPELL
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

`SELECTED POEMS' DISPLAYS JARRELL'S GRACE AND RANGE

I could fill a good half of this review simply by listing the poems that by all rights ought to be included in any "Selected Poems" of Randall Jarrell. The editor, William H. Pritchard, has foreseen this sort of objection and has tried to forestall it.

"It is possible," he says in his introduction, "that Jarrell's productivity has told against his reputation as one of the essential poets." For this reason, he offers a skinny volume (115 pages) that omits many favorites and does not supply replacements.

Any collection or anthology may be taken to task for its omissions. If I have a genuine complaint about Pritchard's selection, it is with its lack of originality, its utter predictability. Of course, any selection of Jarrell will have to include "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," "90 North," "The Woman at the Washington Zoo," "The Mockingbird" and others that, justly or incidentally, form the foundations of the poet's current reputation.

But do we really need, one more time, "A Girl in the Library"? This is a poem that becomes tiresome, since it says in effect that college coeds are lovable dimwits whose best purpose in life is to breed. The way in which the poem delivers this disheartening sentiment is clever and learned and allusive and, at bottom, good-natured. Even so, the emotion that is portrayed is petty professorial vexation, and the intellectual substance is outlined to better effect in Jarrell's essay, "A Sad Heart at the Supermarket."

Even so, "Selected Poems" is essential because it is the only collection of Jarrell's poems now in print. It is the place to go to read that beautifully distressing poem, "Next Day," in which a housewife faces middle age and experiences a sudden despair. "Now that I'm old," she says, "my wish/ Is womanish:/ That the boy putting the groceries in my car / see me. It bewilders me he doesn't see me."

Of the poets of his generation (which I think of as the post-Auden, pre-Beat one) Randall Jarrell strikes me as being perhaps the purest literary artist, a poet determined to take on a wide range of subjects, sometimes almost as self-imposed assignments. "Selected Poems" contains character studies, verse essays on works of art, philosophic meditations, rhapsodies about childhood, animal poems and narratives. The poet handles each of these genres with a seemingly casual skill and brings to each grace and the strongly individual impress of his personality.

Maybe he was thinking of this interdependent relationship with subject matter when he chose in one poem the mockingbird as his symbol for the poet: "A mockingbird can sound like anything./ He imitates the world he drove away/ So well that for a minute, in the moonlight,/ Which one's the mockingbird? which one's the world?"

And perhaps his deep respect for his subject matter is one of the things that makes Randall Jarrell one of the best American poets of our century.