The Diviners: A Book Length Poem (a first printing)

Book by McDowell, Robert

McDowell unites two renascences in American poetry by writing a long narrative poem in a regular form, blank verse. The English language likes blank verse, and the first pleasure we take in this book is with the way the iambs surge forward: one-TWO, one-TWO, one-TWO . . . But McDowell is every foot the contemporary poet, and his plain vocabulary soon shunts attention to his story, that of a dysfunctional middle-class American family. In each of five chapters, McDowell relates the most crucial developments in one decade (1950s through 1990s) of the shared lives of Al and Eleanor and their son, Tom. The whole poem resembles a very good novel-in-stories by some minimalist prose fictionist, but it shares the drawbacks--painfully sketchy characterization and colorless material description--of much minimalism, which McDowell somewhat offsets with his personae's dreams and fantasies. Although the long poem is commonly supposed to induce immediate boredom, The Diviners is good enough to make us wish for more--more detail, more color, more authorial daring. Ray Olson