Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, and Chana Bloch's Mrs. Dumpty.

IN 1995, CHANA BLOCH AND ARIEL BLOCH published their accessible, joyous, and frankly erotic translation of the Song o/Songs: "Feast, friends, and drink/till you are drunk with love!" Meticulous in its scholarship and exquisite in its poetic renderings, the Blochs' version of this ancient lyric sequence refreshingly corrects a long history of tortuous, antisensualist readings by Jewish and Christian exegetes alike. For those like me who believe that the way to read a good poem is to begin by registering the pleasures of its surface, the ideological approaches to the anonymous Song (often referred to as the Song of Solomon) exemplify so-called deep reading at its worst. To interpreters intent upon a "spiritual" reading of this most physical of poems, the lovers could not really be lovers, their sexual encounters could not be sexual encounters, and even the female lover's breasts (compared in the Blochs' translation to "two fawns,/ twins of a gazelle, grazing in a field of lilies") had to be something other than breasts--must, in all seriousness, represent Moses and Aaron, for example, or the Old and New Testaments.

If I may fancifully shift the terms of comparison for a moment, we might say that, like Sleeping Beauty in her thorn-encrusted castle, the Song of Songs had long languished behind forbidding layers of anxiously moralistic, allegorical readings; the Blochs, princelike, came to cut through the overgrowth, awaken her, and set her free. I use the terms of fairy tale here both to acknowledge the "happy ending" that is the Blochs' justly lauded production and to evoke the irresistible, youthful innocence of the Song itself. As Chana Bloch writes in "The Garden of Delights," her introductory essay, "In our day it is the innocence of the Song, its delicacy, that has the power to surprise. Perhaps that very innocence is one source of the poem's continuing attractiveness. To read the Song is to recover, through the power of art, a freshness of spirit that is now all but lost to us." This description--together with the translated text's exuberant evocation of uninhibited and sinless sex--invites us to conceive of the Blochs' joint project as a kind of pre-Blakean "Songs of Innocence."

Chana Bloch's third collection of poetry, Mrs. Dumpty (winner of the 1998 Felix Pollak Prize), presents, not a pair of young erotic adventurers, but rather a long-married couple, banished from the world of fairy tales and the garden of earthly delights. The forty-four lyrics in this new sequence contrast painfully with the work completed in partnership with her husband just a few years before; they might be regarded as Bloch's anguished and solitary "Songs of Experience."

In an essay about the course of her work in poetry and translation, Bloch describes her new collection:

 
   Mrs. Dumpty is about "a great fall": the dissolution of my marriage of 
   twenty-five years because of my husband's mental illness.... These poems 
   chronicle the customary strains in a long marriage--aging, dependency, the 
   erosion of feeling--as compounded by mania, depression, the locked ward, 
   electroshock therapy. And the aftershocks of history as well: my husband 
   and his parents were refugees from Hitler's Germany, and the trauma of that 
   displacement left its mark long after the 1930s. 

A title drawn ironically from a nursery rhyme; the prospect of communiques from "the locked ward"; and allusions to Hitler's Germany: A skeptical reader of this might expect merely a recycling of Plath-like materials in an end-of-the-century, middle-aged context. Mrs. Dumpty, however, is not derivative; it is instead startlingly original work. Eschewing the slackness, sensationalism, and easy self-congratulation of so much current, postconfessional poetry, Bloch offers maturely crafted, psychologically probing lyrics that do not, for all their candor, lose touch with humanizing compassion. They remain aware, in the midst of personal trauma, of the wider world. And they continually move us by asserting--against the all-too-immediate forces of chaos and thanatos--their hard-won allegiance to clarity, to aesthetic ordering, and to life. What we finally admire most about these poems is the way they have, to borrow a phrase from Richard Wilbur, of "keeping their difficult balance."

We find this balance in the way the poet's harrowing story is told. These lyrics are not necessarily in chronological order, and their arrangement allows for counterbalancing perspectives and tones. The book opens with the almost too-clever title poem, in which the battle-weary Mrs. Dumpty, having patiently reassembled her husband after his latest fall, must begin all over again: "and I start wiping the smear/ from his broken face." (Here, though the smear might remind us of tears, the nursery-rhyme trope comes too close to the slang of "egg on your face," which reduces a serious suffering to a temporary social embarrassment.) The next poem, opening the first of four sections, is entitled "Hosanna." It is given over not to present crisis and complaint but rather to past pleasures, and to praise: "for the sticky/ imprint of your sweat up and down my body/ as we studied each other,/ for your honeymoon kisses at dawn/ and Dubrovnik still green.... "The book continues to alternate