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Midwest Eclogue

by David Baker

W.W. Norton, $187

Stumble, Gorgeous

by Paula McLain

University of Michigan Press, $110

Romantic poetry is still the strongest influence on English poetry, but a stumbling block -   from the standpoint of poets, at least - is  its fascination with children. Writing about children or from their point of view is difficult, and  tends to idealise them. Many  poets writing in English avoid children in their art and view them as an occupational hazard.

David Baker  in Midwest Eclogue and Paula McLain  in Stumble, Gorgeous write about childhood within the Romantic tradition, finding it both precious and a source of frightening wisdom. In Midwest Eclogue, Baker looks at his daughter, who has attention deficit disorder, and wonders about nature, both in human beings and in the world. Stumble, Gorgeous succumbs to a view of childhood as a fable of self,  tinged with intelligent, dreamlike violence.

Medicine, precisely described, carries it's own tension. It allows the body to be both thing and self at once. Medicine is the language Baker uses to understand his daughter. 'Of course I mean how/ clinically, tyrosine hydroxylase/ activity - the rate limiting enzyme/ in dopamine synthesis - disrupts, burns/ then rewires her brain's chemical pathways.' Baker, a poet of middle years, has fallen back into the sense of nature as uncanny. To him, it's something beautiful and scientific that might charm him in a field, or go disturbingly haywire in his daughter's mind.

Of the Romantic poets, Baker is closest in sentiment to John Clare, the rustic English poet who spent years in an  asylum. Like Clare, Baker's poetic longing is for stillness. 'I have been docile, conquered/ dependent. The smallest movements matter.' But where Clare spent most of his life unhappy, Baker has a shot at inner peace, and looks on his good luck with a mixture of guilt and wonder 'It kills me to think what a decent pill/ might have meant to the man,' he writes of Clare. Baker's life is both a product of modern science and a victim of it. He describes saving beautiful plants from an old field about to be demolished for development. The non-natural world that saves him and his daughter ruins the natural world he loves.

Stumble, Gorgeous is a stunning debut. For McLain, childhood is an enchantment that gives one power. 'For years it was summer. Grasshoppers fluttered/ And came unstuck with the pop click of a child's toy/ Or the simplest of cameras ... The sky is what's missing ... I was alive/ In the yellow grass. A fuse, wick, a girl-sized torch.' Childhood and the pains of it are interred in the body.

'You know only this: your seven-year-old self/ Hasn't stopped swinging along the rungs of your ribcage./ And this: it will never be enough, the love/ You were granted. Our voices move like sickles,/ Our hands open to want. We stir, We rake the air/ Into lavender ruin. Our barns will come down.'

McLain is honest about the extent of this pain, if not the particulars, with a chirpy humour familiar to Americans, 'No matter how ample  or empty/ The house, you can always find/ Slaphappy and stricken at the same table, sharing a wet bit of bread.' Her work is touchy-feely in the way of poetry of the 90s, a time that brought America some true wunderkind: Lucie Brock-Broido, Linda Bierds, Pattiann Rogers,  the memoirist Lucy Grealy. McClain represents  a second generation. But she comes to the Wordsworthian ideal of 'the child is the father  of the man' from a woman's perspective.

'How the mudbaby left in a field for the crows/ To mother becomes a mother herself .../ Who would believe the world, abandoned/ to  her own will - manifold, pilgrimmed/ Spinning - would dig us out of the dark?'

Baker is where poetry has been, McClain is where it's going. Despite a few glitches (mostly from a melodic ear that runs away from her),  this is a near perfect book. Unlike Baker, McLain has the  enthusiasm of a young poet. Instead of mourning the present, she writes with the belief that suffering is of our own making  and that  it exists to chastise us into being better.  It's  a secularised form of Christian thinking, and McClain mixes it up with the idea that one must both accept and leave behind one's youth. For women in the Romantic tradition, the Christian City on the Hill often merges into the parental household. But to live healthily in the world, you have to distance yourself from both and accept, but not love, suffering.



Midwest Eclogue