The Time Traveler

Joyce Carol Oates

As I've said, the defining feature of a work by Joyce Carol Oates (if there is a single defining feature) is its darkness, its relentless feeling of ominousness. Imagine my surprise, then, to come across the second section of The Time Traveler, which consists partially of ekphrastic poetry (poetry inspired by paintings or other works of art in a different medium) and partially of nature poems. It shook my foundations, not only because it's such a different style for Oates to be working in, but because the quality of the work is so high; one almost wonders, if this stuff is so good, what a piece of chick lit, or other unrelenting fluff, by Oates would read like.

The other three sections of the book are what one would expect from Oates, and subject to all the same picks and pans from my review of Women Whose Lives Are Food... (except that she stays away from the political more here; more gems, less naked political whining), but this second section is a whole other ballgame, and well worth the price of admission on its own. When Oates does the nature poetry thing, her work deserves comparison to that great yardstick of twentieth-century American nature poetry, Hayden Carruth, and it stands up well.

“Morning?--opaque
and dream-muddled.
And outside our windows
the snow is madly churned
as if by heraldic beasts--
not seven or eight starving deer,
all does.”
(“New Jersey White-Tailed Deer”)

Absolutely lovely. It's stuff like this that makes reading poetry a pleasure. Would that there were more of it in the world.