Halfway Down the Hall: New and Selected Poems.

Passions Sketched on Air

by Rachel Hadas Wesleyan University Press. 256 pages. $17.95 (paper).

Halfway Down the Hall contains a generous sampling of poems selected from the nine books the poet has published since 1975, plus thirty-three new poems. If you are a fan of formal verse you will delight in Hadas's skill, but you don't have to count syllables or diagram rhyme schemes in order to enjoy these poems any more than you have to know how a carburetor works to enjoy a country drive.

In her poem "Benefit Night, New York City Ballet," Rachel Hadas writes that she once believed ballet's "mannered mode" to be quaint and outdated, "a dusty stiff brocade/of faded mystery." She continues:

   But that was years ago. Later it came to seem a vain if gallant blow aimed
   at the cruel regime

   of time and gravity by beauty to defy the merciless decree: we grow old,
   sicken, die.

This poem is ostensibly about ballet, but it can be read as a statement of artistic philosophy. Hadas almost always writes in highly formal verse; the rhyming, six-syllable, mostly iambic lines above are a good example of her formal control. Here at the end of the twentieth century, during which every poetic rule and regulation was bent, broken, and turned inside-out, it may seem strange to encounter a poet using such traditional prosody. Aren't patterns like these merely "dusty stiff brocades" from a bygone era?

Hadas thinks not. For her, a poem--or a dance--requires a strong structure if it is to relieve us, however briefly, of "the burdens we all bear." The poem concludes:

   For as we raptly gaze at limbs in cool blue light sculpting a carnal maze
   of intricate delight,

   of passions sketched on air, it is ourselves we see, divested of despair.
   You turn and smile at me.

Though Hadas is one of the best poetic technicians we have, for me her greatest achievement is her ability to adhere to formal constraints without sounding starchy. Even her most rigorously formal lines can seem almost conversational. In the third section of "Three Silences," the poet and her son ride on a merry-go-round:

   At the Kiwanis traveling carnival I ride beside you on the carousel. You
   hold on solemnly, a little pale.

   I don't stretch out my hand. You ride alone. Each mother's glance
   reduplicates my own: the baffled arc, the vulnerable bone.

   Myself revolving in the mirror's eye as we go round beneath a cloudy sky,
   eying my little boy attentively,

   I swallow what I was about to say (no loving admiration is the way to
   bridge this gap) and hear the music play

   and later, wordless, reach and lift you down over the rigid horse's shiny
   brown mane, and press your body close against my own.

To write in rhymed tercets like this, with the added burden of maintaining a strict ten-syllable line, is extremely difficult: a verbal triple lutz. The abrupt line break of "shiny brown/mane" is the only minor awkwardness I find. And some might read this as an intentional awkwardness, imitating the act of lifting a child from the neck of a carousel horse. Hadas is careful to place most of her rhymes at the midpoints of sentences, rather than their beginnings or ends, where they would chime more loudly in the reader's ear. She also uses an occasional slant rhyme ("carnival/carousel," "sky/attentively") to keep the pattern from becoming monotonous. In these ways, the poet ensures that the form does not draw attention to itself, but instead provides a reassuring, almost unnoticeable rhythm, like the clacking of a train on its tracks.

Hadas's most common theme is the uses of art. In "Mayday at the Frick," the poet and her friend meet at the Frick Museum in New York. The friend has recently lost a brother, who was also a good friend of the poet. The man had been an art connoisseur, and as his sister and his friend look at the museum's treasures together, his spirit seems to return to them. This is no maudlin ghost story, though. Hadas quickly asserts that the point is not that art returns the dead to us; it is that art's permanence can both console our grief and help us to understand how loss alters us:

   ... I see him stand between us, gesturing with a careful hand at exquisite
   details we might have missed... he vanishes. It's useless to insist he
   stay. We move past Chinese porcelains, French enamels, statuettes in
   bronze. The portraits that look gravely down at us-- were the faces always
   lined with loss or do I see them with a different eye?

In "At The Tempest," Hadas says that to treat the reading of literature as a hunt for "abstract Themes" (as required by the English teachers of her youth) "now feels all wrong." Instead, she now finds that art's importance resides in its immediacy: "The abstract Theme I once was taught to seek/lodges in some incident last week,/reemerging as the actors speak." Thus the poet and her husband, listening to Prospero's speech in The Tempest about his brother's political maneuvering, do not think of abstract concepts like "power" or "vanity," but are both immediately reminded of "a certain bustling colleague's machinations."

In poems like "Mayday at the Frick" and "At The Tempest," Rachel Hadas stakes a small claim for art's place in our lives. Art may not be able to overthrow mortality's dominion, but it can help us understand and endure the "griefs, pleasures, and weathers" that together make up a life. It can delight us, too--as these witty, elegant poems demonstrate. That alone is something more than nothing.

Joel Brouwer is the recipient of a 1999 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in creative writing. His first book of poems, "Exactly What Happened," is forthcoming from Purdue University Press.