Sewanee Review

These two poets have been friends for more than thirty years. Both have distinctive voices, and both have recently published important collections. George Goode was born in the Shenandoah Valley. He was at the College of William and Mary when he first heard friends talk of Tony Roberts, a student from Doncaster in the North of England, who had [End Page xxxiv] come to the College on a Drapers’ Scholarship. The two kept in touch when Roberts went back to England to teach in Manchester schools, while Goode lived in Athens and Paris, acting as an international tax specialist.

Goode now lives in Lyon with his wife, the novelist Janet McMahon. Close to their apartment the rue Franklin crosses the rue Victor Hugo, which reminds me of a quotation that seems relevant to the verse in Goode’s This Moment Is Gone. Hugo is congratulating Baudelaire on the publication of Les Fleurs du mal in 1857 “vous créez un frisson nouveau”—“you have created a new ‘frisson.’” “Thrill” is a poor translation. This “frisson” is close to the Scottish “grue,” a sensation that travels down the spine, tugs at the hair, and sets the teeth chattering. Goode expresses this best in “The Woods,” as being “transfixed between beauty and terror.” Such disturbances are there from the first poem of This Moment Is Gone.

This Moment is Gone explores shifts of metaphysical recognition in a manner that is rare in contemporary poetry. Goode is also a prizewinning photographer and reliance on concrete detail grounds the metaphysics, as in “Territorial”:

this cold Virginia field where we stand irrevocably as one, the vestiges of a formidable hope, like a sparrow on a black limb antsy to be off, a trace of snow in the air.

and in “The Girl at the Window:”

While the girl at the window   weaves her fantasies, death masks in the leaves, dancing,   grin back at her.

This Moment Is Gone depends as much on the fantasies of “The Girl at the Window” as it does on the shape-changing patterns of leaves—both can be menacing. These fifty-eight poems—privately published by an American poet living abroad—announce an important poetic voice whose perceptions have the power to change our own and whose gentle love poems are certainly not without humor:

Your eyes always seem to speak out   of turn, but their thrust implies a trust in   the unknown, scattering me to the farthest   corners.

In that same poem, “Feedback,” there is a verse in which one can almost hear perfectly George Goode’s voice. He is not only responding to his wife Janet but to friends and readers as well:

    Over the years I have learned   to be patient with the responses I provoke in   others, which is like discovering yourself by long   division.

The collection closes with some of its best poems: “Language,” “The Woods,” “Two Figures,” and “The Blue Mountains.” But no matter what surviving disturbances such long division has revealed, the poet remains a photographer, grounded in concrete detail, as evidenced in “Two Figures”: “looking down through the [End Page xxxv] clear brine at our feet, / the strange coldness of the life of the stones.” Meanwhile in “The Blue Mountains” those memorable stones argue that not all is lost, the moment not entirely gone: “and the trace left / is a poetry made of words as unknowable as stones.”

Goode’s friend Tony Roberts has retired from teaching and has just completed a “wonder year” of publishing, in which he published a group of essays that he edited, Poetry In the Blood, a collection of his own essays and reviews, The Taste In My Mind, and a collection of poems, Drawndark. Drawndark is the best of his collections. However, Roberts’s new collection is thematically sequential with many poems from the three earlier collections—Flowers of the Hudson Bay (Peterloo Poets, 1991), Sitters (Arc, 2002), and Outsiders (Shoestring Press, 2010).

If there is a theme uniting the four collections, it may be the theme of waiting...