Poetic manners have their seasons, and when a season passes, writing in accordance with the older style becomes not impossible, but more difficult to manage successfully. Some manners, on the other hand, occupy something more like an epoch. I’m thinking of the habit, much associated with the traditional lyric in English, and reaching its high point with the Metaphysicals, of working out an image’s associations, implications, and paradoxes, and playing variations on them. This is the sort of thing that John Donne specialized in, so that if a husband’s and wife’s souls "be two, they are two so / As stiffe twin compasses are two..." In the early twentieth century, Frost could manage this machinery with great aplomb ("West-Running Brook," "Sand Dunes," "The Silken Tent"). Closer to our own day, Howard Nemerov comes to mind as one who displayed a deft hand with such variations, though one can see such movements of mind beginning to lose their force. Nevertheless, the more recent modest achievements attained in terms of older fashions continue to serve our literary culture; they echo what has worked in the past and keep the art alive while new modes arise.
           Ellen Bryant Voigt has steadily produced her lyrics for more than two decades now. It may be instructive to note that she was a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop around the same time as James Tate. If her career has been less conspicuous than Tate’s, this should not distract readers from the sturdiness of her accomplishment. While her earlier collections occasionally show a taste for melodrama, the poems in her most recent volume, The Shadow of Heaven, display a distillation of melodrama that is often tainted with the kinds of impurities that yield more complicated and interesting products. Here, for example, are the opening lines of the book’s first poem, "Largesse":

Banging the blue shutters – night-rain;
and a deep gash opened in the yard.
By noon, the usual unstinting sun
but also wind, the olive trees gone silver,
inside out, and the slender cypresses,
like women in fringed shawls, hugging themselves,
and over the rosemary hedge the pocked fig
giving its purple scrota to the ground.

This is sensitive description. To my taste, it’s overly sensitive once we get to the cypresses like "women in fringed shawls, hugging themselves." Thus, if the image of the pocked fig’s "scrota" is a bit over the top, the image at least counteracts some of the sweetness that comes before it.
           Consider also "Apple Tree," which notes the "two plumes of tree" that, "after the surgeon’s chainsaw," leaf out "from one stubborn root." The observation leads the speaker to note that her left hand has "not a single lifeline / but three deep equal / channels." She concludes thus:

O my soul,
it is not a small thing,
to have made from three

this one, this one life.

These are the kinds of relations that Frost could make hay with. Certainly, Voigt’s litotes ("it is not a small thing") modulates the poem’s claims, but lacking here are Frost’s complications of voice and almost subterranean ironies.
           An earlier poem for which I think Voigt is justifiably regarded is "Dancing with Poets," published in The Lotus Flowers (1987). In this poem, in which Voigt pays tribute to "the poets of exile / and despair," the dancing may fairly be taken as a movement in harmony with strong figures of the English-language tradition. The poem in The Shadow of Heaven that responds to this earlier performance is Voigt’s contribution to the growing, albeit uncollected, anthology of poems in tribute to Larry Levis, "What I Remember of Larry’s Dream of Yeats." The title alone points out something of the latter-day poet’s situation, haunted by memories and dreams of a past rich with accomplishment; the poem fairly blooms under the influence of its anxieties. The speaker offsets some of the anxiety by taking refuge among fellow poets who are also colleagues and friends:

A roomful of writers, three on the couch a cat
had pissed on, others clustered like animated trees,
Shahid benched at the melodiophobic piano
Reg had played while Deb and Karen sang;
and centered, under the fixture overhead, Larry,
pleated around a straight-backed chair, not drinking
then, not doing dope, his face above the mustache open  
for company–although I heard him tell the dream
in North Carolina, after he moved to Virginia...

The room seems friendly enough, though the tensions are in the details, the pissed-on couch and the "melodiophobic piano"–need we any further clues that there is a sense of crisis in the poet’s vocation? Further, the poets standing "like animated trees" sounds like something from Dante. As a matter of fact, the image echoes a description from Canto 13 of the Inferno, where the two poets (Dante and Virgil) encounter souls encased in trees. These are the souls of suicides and spendthrifts – those who have squandered their lives or their possessions. Voigt’s poem registers a poet’s anxieties about squandering life devoted to a music that one cannot play. The poem features the poet Larry Levis immersed in Yeats, preparing to teach a course, and immersed in his students’ and his own poems. Into the midst of all this hard labor, Yeats appears to tell the young poet that passion is all that matters in poetry and in life. It’s an expected enough message, and one complicated by Bryant’s rather skillful attentions; there is clearly more than passion at work in the poem. But then Yeats’s appearance is not where the poem ends:

                      So weren’t the dream,
and the telling of the dream, more lanky shrewd inclusive
Levis poems, like those in his books, those he left
in the drawer? If he comes to get them, let him come
in his usual disguise: bare feet, black clothes.

The stance of the bohemian poet is yet another disguise for the yeoman of verse. There is indeed passion here, but it is passion that feeds the difficult work.
           Another noteworthy poem in the collection is "Himalaya," a ghazal with some haunting lines: "When your mother died, I dreamed the wild mountain / of the grave, its myrrh and milk, fur and fleece." Voigt has also included two credible translations from Horace’s Odes, well rendered and made especially interesting, as many translations are, by the translator’s curious liberties. One example is her translation (from Ode 1.34) of quo bruta tellus et vaga flumina as "whereby the dumb dull earth and its fluttering streams." The more expected translation of vaga flumina would be something like ‘wandering streams.’ Voigt’s "fluttering streams" comes as a mild surprise, and "fluttering" contrasts appropriately and well with "dull" (bruta). All in all, The Shadow of Heaven is well worth the price of admission.