The Host: Selected Poems, 1965-1990

What most impresses one about Heyen's ( Ribbons ) work is the consistent level of engagement: one doesn't find poems that don't try. His poetic impulses are, broadly speaking, spiritual, from the early poems about nature to his extensive efforts to come to grips with the Holocaust. The sheer fact of existence--``the branch that all words /break against, the deep fire, the pure poise /of an object''--provokes wonder at the miraculous as well as horror at the reality of evil. Heyen has found varied molds in which to pour his free verse to capture rather disparate subject matter. Even without the references to Li Po, one can see an Eastern influence in his precise observations of physical detail: ``Half the mantis still / prays on my scythe blade.'' Whitman is present in the expansive line Heyen resorts to, not always successfully, and in the catalogues of The Chestnut Rain , the one book included in its entirety. The chestnut is a symbol for nature, mysterious and turned in on itself, but woefully exposed to disease and human exploitation. The seedling Heyen plants becomes a tree of life, and redemption: ``I want to care for it as though, one day, / if it lived, I could climb it to an afterlife.'' But that is a big ``if.'' Although the explicitly ecological poems of the last section are somewhat stilted, one can't deny that Heyen has consistently posed essential questions. (Apr.)