Hayden Carruth and the desire for more cows.

HAYDEN CARRUTH wrote of his friend, the poet, peace campaigner and Christian Denise Levertov, that she "keeps her mind on the reality of imaginative process. She rarely veers into mystical utterance for its own sake." Carruth considers himself a very down-to-earth poet, suspicious of the vatic or prophetic. He is sometimes pigeonholed as a nature poet, which he does not like either, although he conveys the strongest sense of the real outdoors of any American poet since Frost, from whom his anecdotal pentameter monologues (such as "Regarding Chainsaws", "Marvin McCabe" and "John Dryden") ultimately derive.

Carruth detests the "lovelessness, arrogance, and egomania", the "flight from reality" that Thoreau's kind of nature writing has encouraged, and (in the opening pages of his recent autobiographical notes, Reluctantly), makes a tub-thumping case for honest clear-sightedness, for the avoidance of anthropomorphism and sentimentality. Creation is sad, pointless, "without end or reason". There is nothing "Transcendental" in his view of it. He sees only "the absence of intelligence" and feels like "a duck blown out to sea and still squawking".

Carruth was born in 1921 in Waterbury, Connecticut, and grew up in the New England that he writes about so frequently. His Second World War years were chiefly in Italy. He trained as a cryptographer, but much of his army work was paper-pushing.

Although he exposes his life and personality in much of his writing (his 1953 sequence The Bloomingdale Papers, published in 1975, draws on the paralysing years of his mental breakdown, his ultimate "conquest of himself") we learn little about his personal experience of the war: just a glimpse in the poem "The Mountain" of the Hayden Carruth who was a first-class marksman but who hated guns. We learn much more about his experience as a smallholder in Vermont--"the land / hidden from violent times".

The matter of war, the Holocaust, terrorism, Vietnam--these take their place in a world which includes good things, peaceful things too. In particular it includes rural New England and loving women. He clearly sympathises with the peace movement, yet asks wryly, "Will revolution bring the farms back?"

And whatever his subject matter, the question always seems to hang in the air: how can it be that we must die? Even in a poem about an age-old farm activity, "Emergency Haying", the energy and urgency of the task is put in perspective halfway through:

 
   I think of those who have done slave labour, 
   less able and less well prepared than I. 
   Rose Marie in the rye fields of Saxony, 
   her father in the camps of Moldavia ...