Robert Duncan, _The Years as Catches_

I SPOTTED THIS on a table at Third Mind Books in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and thought--what have we here? I had always thought (a) that The Opening of the Field (1960) was Duncan's first collection of poetry and (b) that the five collections of his poems I had read were the whole shebang. Wrong on both counts, as I should have guessed, since Duncan was 41 when Opening of the Field came out and was obviously no beginner.

The Years as Catches was published by Oyez, located in Berkeley,  in 1966, and reprints poems that appeared in Heavenly City, Earthly City, published by Bern Porter in 1947, and Selected Poems, published by City Lights in 1959.  These count as rare books now--Heavenly City, Earthly City is available on Abebooks at prices ranging from $100 to $2500 and Selected Poems (Pocket Poets #10) for from $40 to $80, so I feel reconciled to having spent $40 on this, even though I could have purchased it for half that on Abebooks. Live and learn, or so one hopes.

I was hoping to glean some information about Duncan's decision to reprint these earlier poems from Lisa Jarnot's biography, but was thwarted by there being no entry for either  The Years as Catches or Heavenly City, Earthly City in her index. This may just be a question of careless indexing, but what a pain in the tush.

The poems? Right, the poems. My main impression was that Duncan, in  these poems, had not yet started sounding like Duncan. He had obviously been reading Eliot and Pound and like them liked to stir in some 16th and 17th century vocabulary and sentence construction when writing of contemporary phenomena: 

                     Already ere I wake

I hear that sound. Shout & fill the air with sirens.

No sound that you can make for war or human misery

can meet that sound nor cover it. No waste you wrake

upon the body, no ravaging of mind nor spirit can

make deaf nor blind nor insensate.

That is from the poem "The Years as Catches," written in 1942 and addressing (I think) the disaster of the Second World War in the vein of an older poetic idiom, as we might say Eliot's "East Coker" does. 

When we get to the 1946 poems, though, the poems start sounding less like Duncan's models and more like Duncan, especially those in which he is open about his sexuality. The  love poem "Heavenly City, Earthly City" in particular, while sounding a little like Shelley at times (it reminded me of "Epipsychidion"), looks forward to Duncan's distinctive marriage of a Romantic idiom to a Modernist one.