Junkets on a Sad Planet: Scenes from the Life of John Keats

Clark's ( Sleepwalker's Fate: New & Selected Poems ) long career has included sensitive biographies of poets (e.g., Ted Berrigan, Charles Olson) and scathing journalism about notorious incidents in American literary life (``The Great Naropa Poetry Wars''), as well as dozens of volumes of his own poetry, which has always combined a West Coast post-Beat sensibility with an East Coast hard edge. So it's somewhat surprising that Clark has chosen John Keats as the subject of a book-long collection of 127 poems and prose pieces. Why surprising? Because in this book Clark's style seems to hover between an attempt to mimic Keats and a recasting of Keats into Clark's own modern style. Thus, lush phrases like ``She comes, she comes again, sighing like a ringdove / in the pallid moonshine, or tongueless Philomel / who can not utter her ravisher's name / because he has stolen away her articulation'' compete with tougher lines like ``His endless suspicions and moods, as though everything / He had were about to be taken from him. And it was.'' Clark's prose sections are often the most interesting pieces, offering the most modern as well as the most coldly detailed insights into Keats's life. Overall, while the collection is an impressive display of Clark's ability to master many poetic voices, it is only in the final section, a long 12-part deathbed (or after-death) reverie titled ``Coda: Echo and Variation,'' that the book truly moves beyond loving tribute and technical display to a lovely and sad look back by Keats at his life, lifting the book to a high level. (Mar.)