The Path to Fairview: New and Selected Poems

For more than forty years Julia Randall, unswayed by the whims of fashion, has been crafting poems of an intensity and originality equaled by few of her peers. In The Path to Fairview, Randall presents a distillation of her best work, almost two hundred poems altogether, ranging from three selections from her first book, The Solstice Tree (1952), to more than two dozen new poems. This volume offers the pleasure of watching a poetry unfold, from the elegance of the early poems, whose easy voice belies an impressive formal sophistication, to the newest poems, which embrace a more pliable, freer (though never loose) form. Much of Randall's poetry is Romantic (indeed, two poems are addressed to Wordsworth) in that it attempts to integrate nature and perception and to unite the two in an organically whole vision. And in many poems Randall extols the importance of place. In "Maryland, " for example, she writes: Then if place, / Too, is our ancestor (that is / The forever England concept), this low east, / Like love, rides in the gesture of my flesh. Humor, irony, celebration, and loss weave through these poems, captured in lines of lyrical beauty and often surprising directness. Randall's work offers the opportunity of discovery, expressed in the imagery of "The Writer Indulges a Hobby": We searched the wood again / for mushrooms, after the last rain. In a mile or so / found only a few. Then, coming back, / saw dozens sprung beside our very track, / like leaves, like nuts, like chips of shale, / pale as a sunpatch, dark / as a waterstain, and all before unseen. Intelligent and thoughtful, this long-awaited collection, this summing-up of an impressive career, will repay readers no matter howmany times they take the path through its pages.

Spanning a 40-year career, this collection embraces early, somewhat self-absorbed reflections and Randall's ( Moving in Memory ) more authorative, outward-looking later work. In Romantic poems that praise a sense of place, she invokes her exemplars--Yeats, G. M. Hopkins and especially Wordsworth: "I have done nothing all day but stare / at the dishes, and read Wordsworth / on hiding-places, him who knew so well / what we see clear, but clumsily half-tell." Early poems are imitative and self-consciously aesthetic. But as Randall abandons the traditional quatrain for open forms and a freer line, her poems grow more self-assured while retaining their lyricism. Recent poems, for example, explore family kinships: "I am the half that lived deep down. / My body is taking me there, but I will come / down with a difference. At sixty-nine, / I am in a place my mother has never been." Randall's most engaging poems capture the pleasure of isolated moments, especially as they feed the imagination of, say, a painter like Monet: "Bearded to match his willows, he sits here / by his pond. . . . Let the world be done. / In the quiet of the lilies, never won / since Eden rose and the archangel fell, / that battle with the light goes on and on."
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.