The Ether Dome and Other Poems: New and Selected 1979-1991

by Allen R. Grossman

In addition to substantial new work, Allen Grossman in  The Ether Dome and Other Poems New and Selected 1979-1991  gives his readers a retrospective of a life in poetry that has brought him such honors as a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Witter Bynner Prize of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and a MacArthur Fellowship.  The Ether Dome  is his seventh book of poems.

Genres: Poetry

192 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1991

Reviews

[Peter Prokopiev · Rating 1 out of 5]

Harold Bloom, ever pompous, is quoted on the back cover as saying:
"Grossman takes the risks of writing as a seer and prophet and frequently justifies this perilous ascent to an authentic sublimity." Gawd....
Paz, for example, writes like a seer and a prophet AND makes it work. Maybe it's ust Grossman's neo-Romantic language that makes his poems so dull.

Also, he doesn't seem to have learned Pound's rule: DICHTEN = CONDENSARE.

This reminds me of something Davenport says:
"Mr. Lowell has, indeed, worked hard at being a poet. He has been severe in his output, and knows, with Brahms that writing is all to easy. What's hard is to throw most of what you've written in the trash-basket. He has been smart and modern in metric and diction. And he has been bleak, agonized, and serious, terribly serious. He seems to have always had a headache. He is respected at Bennington. "

[Michael Young · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading The Ether Dome and Other Poems, I found that I couldn’t read the poems silently and truly hear the voice; I had to read them out loud to taste the textures of Grossman’s words on my tongue. Consequently, I often looked like a madman walking down the street, talking, gesturing and laughing to myself. But the result is that I found him to be a remarkable poet. He is a late 20th century child of both Blake and Stevens, but not a child in the sense of merely inheriting traits or styles, but an active creator or, in his own words, “the self-determined maker.” With epigrammatic lines like “Eternity and Time/Grieve incessantly in one another’s arms” he echoes but comments on Blake’s “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.” Or his recurring use of the realm of the unborn recalls Blake’s vale of Har from the Book of Thel but goes on to make further comments for our own time. He engages those paradoxes that strike at unapparent truth as when he says, “Distance and intimacy grow together” or “In the/ Book at hand is a book beyond all hands.” Then he will also comment on and extend Stevens as when he says, “sex and imagination are one” or when he says, “the whole/Body is an Orphic explanation by a most eloquent spirit/Failing to be clear.” To be sure, there is also humor in this, a playfulness that is the mark of a truly great mind.

Unlike Steven and more like Blake, one sees in Grossman a man of vision: a prophet. Stevens was a deep man of intellect and imagination, but not a man of spirit — or should I say, of faith? For Stevens to say, “God and the imagination are one” was to echo Protagoras in saying, “man is the measure of all things.” While for Blake to say, “imagination is Holy Spirit,” was actually to assert the indwelling reality of the divine. Stevens is at the end of the long line of Romantic thinking, but in him there is no faith as there is in Blake. What we have in Grossman is a poet who embraces the polarities of that arc from Blake to Stevens, uniting them in a poetic dialogue that reasserts the status of the poet as prophet. Subsuming the disillusionments in Stevens into a larger spiritual commentary on our time, Grossman reconnects with the dialectic vision we find in Blake. At the same time, he confronts the darker realities of the modern world, assuming the infinite cycles and entropies we take for granted, as in his poem “The Guardian,” where he says,

. . . after a long time, all this will stop, flow
Back into the universe, cease form, cease
To be metal, become another thing,
Become nothing.

It is the colder reality of the flux of a universe too large for us to know. We will be absorbed back into it and this is part of the whole. There is something of the idea of Indra in this, the small god who oversees the current universe, but who himself is merely one in a number of Indras from countless universes as each world is born and dies in the sleep of Vishnu. Grossman’s poems are always peeling back more and more layers of appearance to disclose deeper or more distant realities. Some of those realities are so distant and so deep they no longer include the human. Yet, it is always in the context that we are a part of this, this is the whole spiritual context of our singular existence at this moment. Because of that, it is comforting.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book to read because of some explanation from a dead piano player.

[Julian]

I remember thinking this book, which I read long ago in the land of 1993 or so, was like Eliot and the Ether Dome poems that are the later part of the collection, are a little Eliot-y. But there's a lot of Wallace Stevens in Grossman's work, maybe his primary influence though the tone and imagery are much different in terms of life experience, themes, etc. I might never have made it all the way back into the earlier selections when I was younger, so it was great to read the whole thing and get a good survey of his work (up till about 1993!) These poems work pretty well today though they seem very 20th century.

[Joseph Anthony · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had to put it down. Just not hitting any of my buttons these days.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grossman's poems are beautiful and haunting. Although the poems are complicated, they are accessible and moving.

[R.K. Cowles · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2 stars