Of Indigo and Saffron

November 15, 2010
McClure has not departed from his center-justified, breath-based lines in a career that has spanned more than half
a century. One of the readers at Allan Ginsberg's famed 1955 reading of "Howl" at San Francisco's Six Gallery, McClure, unlike Ginsberg, remains closely associated with that city, and with the varieties of 20th-century Zen and other Eastern religious practice that have emerged from it. Like Philip Whalen, Charles Bukowski, and Jim Morrison (to whom one section is dedicated), McClure infuses ecstatic direct address and colloquial diction with an exquisite sensibility, one that reveals the world in its ordinary complex gorgeousness: "The pain is/ CHILD'S MAGIC/ drunk on/ the vistas/ of weathered/ skin." But as with the world, one has to take the good with the bad: that is the only way in which poems like McClure's Ghost Tantra make any sense: "PLEASURE FEARS ME, FOOT ROSE, FOOT BREATH,/ BY BLAHHR MAKGROOOOOOO TARRR/ nowp tytath brooooooooooooooooooo." It's that deep-end quality that keeps generations of fans of Bukowski and Morrison from discovering McClure's work, but it's also what makes him a greater poet than either of them, as this summative volume, given a little indulgence, shows.

Starred review from December 1, 2010

This 50-year sampling of poems by McClure (Mysteriosos and Other Poems), one of the Beat movement's best-known and enduring writers, was chosen by experimental poet Scalapino with an eye to representing McClure's appreciation of language as "enactment of being." The poet's frequent use of capitalization, for example, is read as "one means of conveying consciousness of being inside and outside." From 1959's "The Breech" ("To be the chalice of the hunt,/ To handspring/ Through a barrier of white trees!") through 2008's Swirls in Asphalt ("THE PRESENCE OF A LAUGH/ is a cave lined with pictures,/ and a smell of rosemary, and the call/ of a red-tailed hawk"), McClure has sought to embody experiential immediacy in cascades of vivid, robust imagery. VERDICT Combining a Buddhist's sense of simultaneity ("HEY, IT'S ALL CON/ SCIOUSNESS/--thumps/ of assault/ rifles/ and/ the /stars") with an activist's roused conscience ("Torturing bodies/ is becoming/ the way/ of the world/ and it/ intrudes/ chilling our hearts."), McClure's poetry seems as vital to the 21st century as it was to the 20th.--Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY

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