He's American, went to Harvard, a non-academic, with poems in The New Yorker, Poetry, etc. Ted Hughes wrote of his work that it's "So fresh and new and itself ... wonderful stuff". I've never heard of him.
He likes physics, in a rather name-droppy way. Titles include "On gravity as a curvature in space-time" and "Un-unified field."
"Acer americanus" (about 6 pages long) has interesting interactions of trees, moon, and self - "Sap is still running sometimes/ as night comes and one's bootprints stiffen/ and overhead among black branches/ the stars bud out"; "'There is only one kind of power,'/ my father said, 'but many kinds of men./ There's only one kind of gravity -/ but there are wings and there are stones.'". The inclusion of mentions of Harding (37th president) is less successful.
"The pony stallion" begins with
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In dusty blockhouses of oak- planking too high to leap, too think for their musketry of hooves, the pony stallions trumpet at one another, march and wheel, their tails and manes a-breeze like a massing of flags. They're exactly the same size as rocking horses! |
Later the rocking-horse and pony interpretations are played against each other in a way I rather like. The line-breaks puzzle me though. The poem has 4 7-lined stanzas, which don't share a pattern. There's some end-rhyming here - "oak/think"; "breeze/size". There's some syllabics - 8/8/7/8/8/6/6. I don't think there's a method to it.
His "thoughts ...", "Notes on ..." and "Perceptions ..." poems begin rather slowly. For example, "Notes on Nostalgia" starts with "Just now many long for the Past/ as though one could live there. But/ nobody ever lived in a Past./ In the Past maybe they lived,/ but to them it was always Now - / as it is with us - a Now/ more like that of a brook or a cloud/ than a stone's or a tree's, meaning/ they never could hold on to any thing/ or any shape for long, even/ when for their very lives they wanted to ...". It warms up later, but poems like "Scenario" and "The chief writes a speech" never get going.
Other reviews
- Michael Tolkien (Dufault is perhaps one of America’s most important and undervalued writers ... His weighty if not unwieldy book divides into two contrasting sections: the first is a treasury of object lessons from present and retrospective correlated experience of the natural and human worlds; the second is a series of scathing reflections on a corrupt political and financial establishment. Here the well-rooted, hard-bitten pioneer of the first part stalks about on rhetorical stilts. His verse becomes inaccessibly allusive or abstract, longer pieces drag, pithier ones are dry or flat. A problem for me is that the psychology behind what’s criticised is analysed in abstruse verse while particular episodes are presented separately and without clear connection to the defined malaise.)
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