An Altogether Different Language.

Anne Porter's An Altogether Different Language is a work of great refreshment.

American poetry flourishes in rich variety, as its parameters expand. Even so, this book is extraordinary, a rare flight.

For one thing, these are lyrics of praise for a world that is praiseworthy because it is created. Praise, especially grateful praise, is a mode dreadfully long out of fashion.

For another, Porter is a poet of faith. References, lexicon, scenes, and persons are refracted through a Catholic belief free of doubt or contention. It is not political or argued; not worldly, not naive. More, it is a working faith, from which Porter tries to realize daily consequences. And it is unmistakable. She builds in none of the usual defenses (obscurity, discontinuity, self-mockery, self-pity.) Her poems are floral and tuneful, responsible and unprotected. They debate nothing, and express no issue narrower than faith in love and its praise.

"I'll try," she says at Christmas, "to catch up with the shepherds." She tries, not to interrogate or subvert them, but to recall us to what the songs tell us they saw: "as the angels told us, He shines in a dark valley."

Again she tries, in conceiving her calling as poet in terms of the Pasture Rose, rosa humilis, "a small peasant rose...I try to learn/As if the Lord had told me/Listen to the rose/Be the voice of the rose."

Readers of Commonweal (where Anne Porter's poems have for a decade freshened the air and heightened the light) know already that these poems are unmatched. How she does it, how this most sophisticated person marshals her sophistication to order the apparently simple lines, can't be pinpointed.

David Shapiro's introduction to her book is, in its way, as unusually excellent as the poems. It is cogent, eloquent, true, and not to be missed. But even he falls short. A central lightness and freshness perdure, mysterious. It remains to read the poems, and see.

In phrasing and structure, many poems are, like prayers, addressed elsewhere, for us to overhear. In a perfectly realized elegy/eulogy, "For My Son Johnny," Porter prays to her dead child as to a heavenly intercessor. Self-described as "a man without money or power," he loved woods, fields, God; he was angry, tender, awkward, dear. Porter's tact in revealing his innocent life is absolute.

It's her daring that does it, as she risks what our generation cannot abide, sentimentality. She always escapes that, not by overriding irony, but by modesty that sustains her in reporting her emotional truth, as in the poignant ending:

Now you're with Mary, whose

starry veil you loved,

And of whom you said, "She won't

get bored with my puns,"

And "She won't mind if I touch her

dress."

While your mother, who sometimes

did

get bored with your puns,

Cries here on earth

And asks you, now that you're one

of the greatest,

To grant her a portion of your littleness.

With this poem the book achieves it apex of intimacy. Elsewhere, Porter may use a shorthand of generalizations at times. (They are prayer-like or biblical, in that she is sure we can call concrete cases to mind when she says, "the wounded," "the old," "the poor.") In "For My Son, Johnny," however, all is unpacked, explicit, its concrete instances chosen by heart and by wit, to evoke a keen sense of a person the speaker loves.

The poem turns up other important themes, too: life after death, the natural world, the worth of littleness. Porter's work finds itself, I think, on the little way of Therese de Lisieux--a way of local, child-small, I-Thou acts and gestures, none easy, all unpretentious. The Theresian way joins the way of Saint Francis (and perhaps Saint Bonaventure's Way of the Mind to God, which cherishes a consciousness grounded in recognizing vestiges of the holy everywhere).

Landscapes and events shine in Porter's words for the real world. "A List of Praises" celebrates earth's music: "The skirling of seagulls," "the rasp and sizzle of crickets, katydids, and cicadas," peepers' "shimmer of bell-like cries." She has a gift for sketching a panorama, then focusing on a close view in lovely cadences of conclusion. "Autumn Crocus" zeroes in from a wide spectacle of fall to where "the earth/breathes out the unearthly blossoms/Of the autumn crocus/Around the tool-shed door."

In "Leavetaking" Porter adds, to the work of praise, her wise exploration of what it is to be old--a field where few of the discoveries peculiar to poetry have yet been made:

Nearing the start of that mysterious

last season

Which brings us to the close of the

other four,

I'm somewhat afraid and don't

know how to prepare

So I will praise you.

To do so, she names crows, buttercups, her childhood, smashed glass, and blue chicory. Prayer of praise then shifts to petition: "I thank you for that secret praise/Which burns in every creature,/And I ask you to bring us to life/Out of every sort of death/And to teach us mercy."

The power implied in the fine title poem, "An Altogether Different Language," angelic, not one Porter claims for herself. Her language is not angelically disembodied but human, and markedly hers. Its choices of inclusion and exclusion are moved by the received faith of Catholic spirituality. Bloy and Bernanos, Peguy and Claudel wrote from just such a foundation a generation or two ago. But Porter's understanding is fresh, American, womanly, and her own.

Her diction is Theresian, in a rather small middle range, with a ready music of assonance. What generates her wonderful tone is faithfulness to the terms and occasions of belief native to her.

It is an instantly recognizable pitch, refined by the framing and point of her view. Well modulated, it is the pitch of a dynamic and transfiguring equanimity. It may be our hearts are restless until they rest in this way.

Like the tunic of Saint Francis in the luminous "Song for the Town of Assisi," the poems are "Reproach and treasure." Treasures fill them: a tree, a bird, Long Island, Chartres, Easter, a kind neighbor, a brave servant. She discerns in them "that secret praise/Which burns in every creature." ("Reproach," for some of us, may lie in our failure--never hers!--to see in each creature the presence of praise.

Part of the power of her work is that it looks easy, as when we watch someone walk confidently forward across the ground. Glance again, though, at Anne Porter crossing the stages of this world, and who knows? we may perceive she has achieved her notable equipoise while step-dancing on a tight wire, strung high outside the conventional demotic nets of her fellow poets.

Marie Ponsot lives in New York City. Her most recent book of poetry is The Green Dark (Knopf).