The poems of Eugene Grace sometimes startle, sometimes irritate, sometimes entrance me. And that is only the barrest listing of the complex emotions they arouse. T hey are not often pretty poems, sometimes they are not well made, now and then they may seem overly naive or even fatuous. But they are genuinely thought about and what is much more important, they are genuinely felt through. Often as not they are philosophical musings on time, nature, God, ontology, the cosmos, and many other Heavy Questions, but Mr. Grace eschews any step-by-step logical cogitation and plunges toward his subject matter with pure naked feeling. It is hardly accidental that he often names swimming as the means of locomotion in his journey towards the truth; he identifies both the mind and the matrix of external nature with a dark and trackless ocean. The individual soul is called to investigate theses dark water as by a tropism, and what it finds within them is both glorious and frightening. Mr. Grace method is gnomic. Subjects too large, too grandiose, for any lyric poem are undertaken in a few brief trimeter of tetrameter lines. The result may be mere platitude or a thorny puzzle or a brilliant image glimpsed and pursued or a strong original insight. It is a hit-or-miss process and the misses are as necessary to the poet's integrity as the very palpable hits. "The barn roof's squatting on the ground/Like an old man in the pasture/Where it aged and aged to its knees": Here is an image idiosyncratic, striking, and apt. Yet I can't think of another poet who would have repeated the verb, "aged and aged," a device successful in a way that a more elegant of clever construction would not be.
