Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems

This trove of old and new Meredith is a medic's kit for the tired at heart. The earlier poems--starting with selections from Love Letter from an Impossible Land, his 1944 first book that took the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, and continuing up through The Wreck of the Thresher (1964)--are as subtle as aspirin. So easily digestible in their precise meter and perfectly tuned end-rhyme, their power goes virtually unnoticed until the reader lifts his eyes from the page to find himself moved, affected. In work inspired by the poet's service at sea during WWII, devastation comes on the hushed waves of sonnets: ""This is a stuff that cannot come to rest/ For it owns ties to heaven and to the ground;/ While there are achings in the lodestone flesh/ Still will the quick move out and the dead move down."" The poems in the book's latter half (1970-1987) find formalism surrendering some ground to free verse as Meredith attempts to salve not the sharp pains of war but the blunted ache of aging--""But the clock goes off, If you have a dog/ It wags, if you get up now you'll be less/ Late""--and the absence of such fallen comrades as Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, W.H. Auden and John Berryman. (June)