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Composing Voices:
A Cycle of Dramatic Monologues
poems by Robert Pack
Poetry ISBN 0-9762114-0-8 $20.00
US $25.00 CANADA 5.5 x 8.5 144
pp
2005 Montana Honor Book of the Year Awar
2006 Press release
Robert Pack’s new volume of poetry, Composing
Voices: A Cycle of Dramatic Monologues, is a fabulously expanded
version of his 1984 book, Faces in a Single Tree. In each
of the poems a single person is talking to one other person to whom
he is intimately related, creating deep dramatic tension: a father
talking to a bereaved daughter or puzzled son; a sister confronting
a sister gone astray or a brother to whom she is confessing her
compromised pregnancy; husbands and wives, old and young, reviewing
some crisis of their lives together. Combined with these human dramas
are the dramas of nature. Pack inherits Robert Frost’s sensitivity
to the minutiae of spectacle and evolution, the mysteries of God
and Darwin’s theories. He regards these with humor and compassion.
And, perhaps miraculously, but surely most wisely, he does it all
within the regulations and beauties of blank verse.
Pack has added to his first cycle of monologues some characters
who are not necessarily related by blood. Here we find relations
of professional intimacy—lawyer and client, doctor and patient. All
possible human concerns are excavated in these poems: humans and
God, humans and the environment, humans and their most significant
others, including pet monkeys and ghosts. All these characters are,
of course, the creations of a single mind, that of the author’s.
In this new book, Pack has included a prologue and epilogue that
explain his rationale for such a work of human exploration through
fictional invention. His Prologue opens thus: “ Perhaps
I can convince you that I am/ quite like the other characters you’ll
meet / within with book—although I have a life / that’s more than
words where we, alas/ Dear Reader, here in this country / where
bright orchestrated words are all / the measured air we can accommodate.”
And the “Author’s Epilogue” begins thus: “Go little book, get the
hell out of here, / I’ve had enough of these imagines lives/ invented
to augment my finite own.”
After establishing yourself, after Frost, as our best poet of nature, you are competing for the crown, after Browning, of best dramatic monologist. The collection [COMPOSING VOICES: A CYCLE OF DRAMATIC MONOLOGUES] is superb, each monologue a suggestive story, with lovely continuing references to attacking grizzlies, plane crashes and the like. And your Author's Epilogue is perfect. Congratulations. . . . Your voice in these poems is so relaxed and normal, yet the poems are full of tension. You go from strength to strength out there in the Montana wilderness.
—Robert Brustein
This is a book born of deep long-lasting fascination with the human predicament, and with the history of English poetry and its uses; it is a book that could well be treasured by a new generation of poets looking for a way from simple self-expression into meaningful vision and afirmation.
—Pamela White Hadas
The dramatic monologues in Composing Voices
are not just poetry; they are our own voices—if we dared utter these
thoughts and feelings. The subjects of these poems are the things
we imagine saying to our loved ones, or to our most intimate friends,
but we can never quite find the right moment; they remain unsaid.
Not in this book. These monologues express such intimacy; they say
the unspeakable.
—John Irving
Robert Pack’s marvelous new collection, Rounding It Out:
A Cycle of Sonnetelles, employs a form of sixteen lines invented
by Pack that borrows from both the sonnet and the villanelle, repeating
lines and rhymes. Divided into four sections of twelve poems each,
the sequence reproduces the cycle of the day: morning, midday, evening,
and night. Cyclic time is at the center of the entire collection:
how the seasons change our perceptions of the natural world; how
we fit into the larger scheme of cosmic time and recurrence.”
Throughout this skillful sequence, Pack plays with the notion of
observer and thing observed, the desire for the self to merge with
nature, and the ever-present reminders of impermanence. Even though
the sun itself will explode in time (as “Aubade” notes),
all the momentary joys in nature—a perfect tomato, the lilac’s
aroma in May, a moose standing in the still silence, a dewdrop on
a maple leaf—uplift the soul. Pack’s best lines have
a Keatsian intelligence: his simple puns and crisp vocabulary, invite
us to find “solace in grief when grief is rhymed”—sound
advice from an expert.
—Kirkus Review
Elk in Winter is an outstanding collection of poems by
one of America’s most distinguished poets. Of late twentieth-century
poets, he is the one most influenced by Robert Frost, writing in
the same heavily stressed iambs meant to sound like common speech
and leaning on Nature to provide instruction. But Pack differs from
his master in several significant ways. He depends on modern science
rather than common sense as the conduit of what is reliably true;
he speaks more intimately of his family than Frost ever did, and
his focus is as much on his own consciousness as it is on anything
around him. His poetic range is impressive. He can be oddly funny
as in the frog poems or in the brilliantly ornate and somewhat rueful
“Clone.” Pack is a man measuring out his solitude not only
in the space around him but in the distance he is from his past.
Pack has always been a master of the use of verse forms, and he
displays his mastery here. But what is most moving and significant
about his collection is its project, which is to find “what can
connect my sense of me/ from where my life has been/ to where I’m
sitting now.
—Mark Strand
“Across the mountainside in evening sun / Golden October larches
flare. As if they could delay dark days to come, / Winter encroaching
everywhere…” These lines from “October Larches,” fairly
set the scene for Elk in Winter, Robert Pack’s new collection
of poems. One of America’s most distinguished poets, Pack is a Frost-like
poet in many ways, but he remains his own self. As he remarks in
“Defiance,” a poem in which he is observing a red-tailed
hawk, “So let me concentrate / On what I see, not what thought adds.”
In “Showdown,” the final poem of this engaging book, the
reader is advised that “Maybe we’ll get it better on a second try.”
Because of its inspired perception and decency, Elk in Winter
is a volume well worth reading. After considering cosmic expansion,
this thoughtful writer concludes with the pertinent speculation
of whether “eventually, nothing alive, intelligent or self-aware,/
will manage to survive?”.
—Times Literary Supplement
Among Robert Pack’s eighteen books of poetry,
his most recent collections are: Elk in Winter (2004),
Rounding It Out (1999), Minding the Sun (1996),
and Fathering the Map: New and Selected Later Poems (1993),
all published by the University of Chicago Press. Pack’s poetry
focuses on such major themes as man’s relationship to nature, and
human intimacy—friendships and family relationships. His most recent
book of criticism, Belief and Uncertainty in the Poetry
of Robert Frost, was published in 1993 by the New England University
Press, a study of Frost in the tradition of nature poetry. Pack’s
earlier collections of essays, The Long View: Essays on the
Discipline of Hope and Poetic Craft and Affirming Limits
were published by the University of Massachusetts Press. He has
completed a book about Shakespeare’s major plays, Willing to
Choose , to be published in 2006.
Pack received his B.A. degree from Dartmouth College in 1951 and
an M.A. from Columbia University in 1953. He taught
at the New School for Social Research in New York, at Barnard College,
and at Middlebury College, where he was given the Chair of Distinguished
Faculty Professor of Literature and Creative Writing, a position
which allowed him to teach wherever in the curriculum his interests
took him. He taught literature and creative writing classes in the
English Department and the Literary Studies Program and also in
the Program in Environmental Studies, where his interests in psychoanalysis,
Big Bang physics, and Darwinian evolution came into play. He served
as the Director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference from l973
to 1994 and taught at Middlebury College’s graduate school of English,
The Bread Loaf School, for over three decades. For years Pack served
the Woodrow Wilson Foundation by teaching in residence for a period
of one to four weeks at various small liberal arts colleges throughout
the country, most recently at Rocky Mountain College in Billings,
Montana, in 2000, where he was awarded an Honorary degree in the
spring of 2001.
Pack has had a Fulbright Fellowship to Italy where he translated
the Mozart librettos, and has been given awards for his poetry by
the National Council of the Arts, The Borestone Mountain award,
the American Scholar Mary Elinor Smith Poetry Prize, and, most recently,
the Mortar Board of Montana award for excellence in teaching. His
poems and essays have appeared in over a hundred magazines and anthologies
such as American Scholar, The New Criterion, The
Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, The Yale Review,
and The New Yorker. In 1994 he was awarded the Dartmouth
College medal for lifetime accomplishment and leadership.
Pack now teaches courses in Shakespeare, Romantic Poetry, Modern
Poetry, Creative Writing, Visions of Nature, and Ways of Knowing
at the University of Montana in Missoula in the English
Department and the Honors College.
Poems from Composing Voices
The Cracked Apple Tree
Right on that branch we saw the snowy owl
the one time it arrived from Canada.
Don’t cut it down! I know it’s past the age
for bearing useful fruit; it crowds the house
and darkens both the upstairs rooms, but we
have changed the place enough—the well is new,
the paneled walls, and all those shelves you built
are crammed with books. The day we bought the house
old Phillip put it in your mind to clear
the trees that blocked the vista to the west:
“People like to fix things up themselves,”
was what he said, and yet we’ve left it there
for over twenty years, just as you’ve left
his broken harrow rusting in the field
as if it were a piece of sculpture, though
it’s like the rib cage of a dinosaur.
Phillip was afraid to cut it down;
he told me that he saw a girl’s ghost there
whose lover murdered her when she got pregnant.
She lived down the road before this house
replaced the one that burned, and Phillip said
that we can find a record of her death
somewhere in the local files. Last week
when you were pruning it, you left your sweater
hanging on a branch, and when I took my walk
beside the stream before I went to bed,
I saw it flutter in the moonlit breeze
and thought of Phillip’s story of the girl.
My father kept a bear’s head in his den
over his desk: he teased me as a child,
pretending that the bear would talk to him.
I never found out if he shot the bear.
I know you like to watch that great stone ridge,
framed by the distant Adirondack range,
after the brittle leaves have fallen down.
I’ve seen you sit beside the window, staring
at the long striations—yellow, tan, and brown
turning to orange as the sun comes up—
as if you saw something you couldn’t share.
I’ve warned the children not to bother you
when you take on that inward mood of yours.
What if a blizzard drives the snowy owl
down here again, and he can’t find his branch?
What if the man returns, filled with remorse,
seeking his lover by our apple tree?
One can’t be certain such things don’t occur.
Your books are full of mysteries and puzzles,
half-invented memories, and
choices that can’t be explained. You’ll never know for sure
if Phillip made the murder story up
about the pregnant girl as an excuse
to leave the tree uncut. You’ll never know
if I invented father’s talking bear.
I saw the look that crossed your face when I
told you about the girl; I’m certain you
were ready then to let me have my way.
You leave the harrow lying in the field;
you keep your thoughts about the layered ridge
and what its colored lines remind you of,
and let me keep the cracking apple tree
for our love’s sake. For if you don’t, my dear,
I’ll put my wedding nightgown on and stand
there in the moonlight on the tree-stump, still
as your ridge, as if I were a snowy owl.
© 2005 Robert Pack
Prayer for Prayer
Darling, splitting the wood can wait until
the wind dies down. I want to try to say
what’s troubling me, although we vowed before
we married that we’d keep our own beliefs
and let the children choose. They’ve left home now;
there’s not much more that we can do for them;
it’s you and me together, only us,
and I’m afraid you won’t get into heaven,
not having turned to God. Without you, how
could I be happy there, unless God wills
that I forget this life? I don’t want that!
The March sun hasn’t thawed those icicles
gleaming along the edges of our roof;
perhaps this constant wind has numbed my faith.
I’ve never had to ask you this before,
but would you try to pray? Make up the words
if only for my sake; start thanking God
for daily things like breakfast oranges
heaped in the yellow bowl your mother painted—
a couple bathing in a waterfall—
our wedding gift of thirty years ago;
thank Him for your routine: feeding the birds
in winter, pruning apple trees in spring;
thank Him for splitting wood. You know I know
that even when you grumble, still it’s work
you love. Nothing I do will feel complete
until I’ve given thanks for doing it,
so that I’m not alone: like thanking you
for thanking me when I prepare a meal
adds grace to grace. That’s not a phrase you’d use;
you would prefer to hold some meanings back:
“Grace is not fattening, how can it hurt?”
but what we feel is not so far apart,
though maybe it’s the very space God wants
to test us with? My mother used to say:
“You cannot cling to what you love with all
your strength; God made some special part of us
for letting go.” I understood her when
our children left, and I can almost see
the spaces where they were. Maybe sorrow
is allowed in heaven, so God won’t have to
cancel human love by making us forget?
I won’t forget, not willingly; one day
in paradise, watching the clouds, I’d think
of you standing beside the frozen stream,
eyeing the wood still to be split and stacked,
and I’d be back on earth—at least at heart.
God means for marriages to end with death,
but after that the Bible isn’t clear.
Perhaps God’s love begins where human love
completes itself, and yet I’ll never tire
of the past we’ve shared. I know you’ll promise me
you’ll try to pray, and then you’ll ask the Lord
to help me find the strength to give up prayer—
as if God would enjoy your joke; you’ll swear:
“By yonder icicle, I’ll love the world until
it does me in!” Thinking is the problem;
we can’t escape the sorrow of an end
without an end, death going on and on.
Although you never speak of it, I know
your father died while he was splitting wood;
your mother’s telling always starts the same:
“Some snow had fallen on his knitted hat . . . “
as if for her all time had stopped. Maybe
that is what heaven’s like? She seems to smile,
but then the age lines darken in her face.
Darling, I know you know something in me
approves your laughing at my need to pray.
By yonder icicle, what human love
allows, we have! But don’t stand grinning with
that orange in your mouth as if you were
some sacrificial pig! Go split more wood
while I put dinner on; listen to God’s
silences even as the wind blows through
the icicles and piles snow by our shed;
we may be in for quite a night of it.
© 2005 Robert Pack
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