To the Center of the Earth is the first collection of Michael Fried's poems to appear in the United States. It includes a selection of poems from an earlier volume, Powers, published in England in the seventies, along with more recent work. The keynote of all the poems is lyrical intensity, which at times reaches visionary levels. Many of the poems are brief, but none is small or slight: they combine sensory precision of great vividness with a deep-grounded musicality that gives to their rhythmic and syntactic structures an unexpected and wholly original power of expansion. At the same time, what Ian Hamilton has called their "present-tense insistence on the totality of the poem", both as evocation of passionate experience and as verbal artifact, links them with the abstract painting and sculpture that Fried has championed in his art criticism. For all their economy, Michael Fried's "muscular, tense and immensely resonant" poems, to quote one critic on Powers, are among the most sensuously direct and arresting being written today.
These poems are mostly short and sometimes epigrammatic. With work of such brevity, one expects, and is rewarded with, strong lines and crisp, sharp images. This is particularly true in a section called "Powers," with its broad consideration of war, air, seas, rivers, highways, and the secrets of the heart. Here is one poem ("Assassination") in full: "Black now as frozen lakes/The tall buildings of New York/Make awkward mourners." Ultimately, it is wisdom the reader comes away with-not so much answers to the great questions but honest views of real life. Fried (art history, Johns Hopkins) has published abroad, but this is his first collection to be published in America. Highly recommended.-Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia Copyright 1994 Cahners Business Information.
An art historian at Johns Hopkins, Fried ventures skillfully into poetry with this collection of precise, imagistic poems. The work is focused on the natural world, calling on such themes as ``The Thunder Orchard'' and ``The Flash of Lightning.'' The words themselves are carefully chosen. A few poems, such as the single-line ``Powers'' and ``Poem,'' are so brief that they seem to resist the reader, and in these the sensibilities of an artist seem curiously absent. Yet the speaker in other poems can be remarkably charming, and the smallness of the poems often belies a real depth of feeling. In ``Packing Up,'' he describes leaving a disinterested lover, and concludes, ``I stack another room of books/ Inside three tea-chests and nail them shut./ I wish words mattered less to me.'' In ``Cloudburst,'' Fried writes of the experience, ``The mist rolled away,/ I stood there drenched and shaking/ Transformed into a bull.'' Fried has a gift for keen observation, and it is interesting to imagine both larger poems and the possible translation of some of these lines onto the canvas. (Dec.) Copyright 1994 Cahners Business Information.
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