To find oneself alive is a task inside a mystery
inside a world overturned, re-aligned to
a single song by which you are
made solar, unbegotten, wrecked
and reclaimed: from a catalog of
bones to a tome of diadems.
Shining with grievance & noise.
(from “Sunderland Blues”)

Given the haphazardly re-aligned and noisy situation of poetry now, I believe that almost every thoughtful reader will recognize in Sunderland a heroic book, and that many will acknowledge it to be a tragic one as well. Its heroism consists in this: resistance and, in specific, a magniloquent resistance to Gnosticism, the fatal heresy which Pritchett’s profound and fully humane intelligence cannot finally reject. These splendid poems come into being in dauntless sequence, under a rubric perhaps best articulated by Wallace Stevens at his best: “The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully…” (from “Man Carrying Thing”). The term “heresy” comes down to us from the Greek for “choosing.” And it is Pritchett’s struggle not to choose a futureless (and therefore ultimately featureless) vision of our contemporary circumstance that gives the sequences of Sunderland their thrilling tragic dignity.

Where nothingness holds nothing
but all the brilliance
we have wept & lost.
(from “Rites of Spring”)

Surely this is irony, but irony in the tragic note. (As T. S. Eliot says in his Clark Lectures, “Real irony is an expression of suffering”). Pritchett suffers the irony of “nothingness” counterpoised with “brilliance,” of the vacant contest of Gnosticism with the purposeful beauties of creation, and in Sunderland, irony constitutes resistance. In this, Pritchett proves to be neither disarmed nor isolated. One of the most subtly and effectively allusive of our poets, he enlists, via allusion, powerful helps—poets of the trecento, Franz Schubert, Georg Trakl, D.H. Lawrence and, most forcefully and consistently, the Eliot of Four Quartets. Like Four Quartets, the poems of Sunderland conduct a tireless interrogation of words themselves—words as the thingness of this world—in a forlorn but strangely sustaining quest for the Word. It is precisely this forlornness that gives the Gnosticism away, shadowing the quest.

There are, of course, other instances of contemporary poets leaning into, lending an ear to Four Quartets in times of crisis. The most vivid example can be found in Three Poems, the book in which Ashbery, constantly referencing Eliot, seeks to know the nature and space of the Soul at mid-life, nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita. That he did indeed acquire the knowledge he sought—e.g. “Your miserable premature spring has finally turned into the real thing” rhyming with Eliot’s “Midwinter spring… Sempiternal though sodden”—is borne out by the pivotal, companionable presence of the soul in all of his subsequent collections. Yet in Sunderland, Eliot’s Quartets serve not only allusive purposes (although this Pritchett accomplishes masterfully); they also serve as a constant and literal subtext, a ghost in the machine. In the opening poem, “Sunderland,” we read:

What is it to weep beside
an open window
and believe in the child who
believes in God?

And we cannot help but catch the echo of “You are here to kneel / Where prayer has been valid.” In “Instructions from the Angel at the Dead End of Time,” we find “The end of time is always/now / & now/& now. / Holy entropic. Endlessly viral.” And we hear “And the time of death is every moment,” in conjunction with “England and nowhere. Never and always.” And there is this, and so much more, in “The Broken”:

The boon of the dead
is that they burn down
the future tense
in the perversity
of their largesse.

A flame comes forward from “the communication / Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.” I am not simply tallying up allusions here, nor do I believe that Pritchett is dabbling in palimpsest. No, for there is a poignant and troubling swerve in each echo and permutation. Prayer gives way to nostalgia and weeping. Eternity slides into entropy. And the message of the dead to the living becomes arson and the perversion of both language and futurity. An overarching theme of Sunderland is the forlorn abandonment of creation to the malice of change, the Gnostic’s demon. And it is Pritchett’s resistance to that malice that makes his allusions to sing out even as they swerve towards negation.

The place called “Sunderland” is Pritchett’s East Coker, i.e. a place of ghostly origin and penitential and/or outraged return. In “Forsythia,” the poet approaches this place with much the same language and decorum as Eliot’s approach through the “deep lane” and “electric heat.” But the road to Sunderland is “asphalt” and “erratic scars of light”. Origin appears to have been disfigured and haunting diminished. In Sunderland, “Nothing is infinite.” Despite beautiful expectations and painful effort, the Gnostic’s homecoming is always to a place of abandonment.

What is home?
An effacement of the map?
The great hammer smash of the inflated soul?
My migraine is my home.
It sings to me the place
where I must go
even though I must go alone.
The little flame of pain
that makes the core of
being touch the core of flesh.
You know what I mean, friend.
We grieve for a single word
tossed by the side of the road.
An enigma that shelters then evicts.
(from “Forsythia”)

For Eliot, “Home is where one starts from,” the singular and original word, the soul’s instigator. Thus it was entirely right for Ashbery to reference Four Quartets in his soul seeking. And it is equally right for Pritchett to do the same in these early gestures of continuity and good faith. Yet in Sunderland, the gestures are cruelly thwarted. Faith must endure the insult of enigma. “Forsythia” is heroic poetry, instancing both effort and a desolate candor in the futility of its effort. Soul is found in fact, but proves to be simply another word (not Word), another vacancy to grieve: the site of pain; a pinpoint of “effacement” and “hammer smash.” Pritchett returns to what, in the Gnostic’s world, can only and repeatedly evidence an immitigable “eviction,” creation itself being, all in all, a mug’s game. In the closing lines of “Forsythia,” arrival is greeted by “Nothing clear.” The penitent’s “teardrop” neither cleanses nor absolves. Where Eliot discovered a “further union,” the candor of Sunderland remarks “smear & smatter.”

East Coker is, for Eliot and his poem, a place of the fathers, of “necessary coniunction” and of generation. To return is to recover the place and to feel, even in something as mundane as an “evening with the photograph album,” the blessed punctum of “a lifetime burning in every moment.” Sunderland is likewise a place of the fathers. But Pritchett’s return is greeted, in a sort of rapid, Mennipean cinema, by disaster first, and then a desolation.

We were divers once,
we sang the songs of
our fathers, whose graves
we dug with love.
To be astonished is
to be obliterated.
Like watching the Milky Way
grow older or liturgy
dissolve into starlight.
Why wrangle with amen
when ragged thistledown
entangles prayer?
“Calling Barranca,” the radio said.
But it was only Jean Arthur
at the piano, banging out grace
for the sins of tomorrow.
(from “Jean Arthur at the Piano”)

Filial piety is atomized. The figures and ceremony (“Milky Way” and “liturgy”) of Heaven simply “dissolve into starlight,” a further instance of “smear & smatter.” In a move as startling as that of any Metaphysical, Pritchett then cites a film by Howard Hawks from 1939, Only Angels Have Wings. Jean Arthur plays the love interest amidst a crew of daredevil pilots flying the mails over the perilous Andes. The irony of that title’s appearing just here, in a tangle of liturgy, sin and prayer, is hilarious, more than a little cruel (especially to Eliot), and terribly apt—Mennipean and Metaphysical all at once. Allusion sometimes bests the imagination. And Pritchett, even in the anguish of his doomed resistance—graves dug lovingly to no eternal purpose, prayers garbled by thistledown—finds grace and wit to concede the afterlife of his efforts to a noisy, sound-stage piano. What Eliot’s beloved Dame Julian termed “the voice of this Calling” here becomes an S.O.S. from no one to nowhere, another gnostic night at the movies.

And yet I would be both wrong and purblind to suggest that, in the vision of Sunderland, effort is inevitably disappointed and anticipation routinely desolated by circumstance. The success of Pritchett’s poetry, as poetry, is everywhere self-evident. And it is a further pleasure to note that the radiant energy of this success often comes from a source too little employed in contemporary writing: magniloquence. Pritchett makes bold to speak in the higher keys from time to time, in his bitterness and in moments of exaltation. Thus, he continues to prosper from the precedent of Four Quartets. These lines, in one of the book’s several title poems, echoing the “open field” and “bonfire” of “East Coker,” evince the eloquence of despair as keenly as Eliot’s “Feet rising and falling. / Eating and drinking. Dung and death”:

In a fair field full of folk
in a field of gold a broken tassel
droops, lighting the lane to
the land of the abandoned.

Here I found my bread of pain.
Daily I sup on it.
It does not sustain me.
Here, where I lost my true love.

From the bold alliteration of “a fair field full of folk” (which Pritchett takes from Piers Plowman) to the perils of “bread of pain” and “my true love,” Pritchett overmasters convention and bathos by an unequivocal sincerity. And sincerity is a sure foundation for eloquence here, just as surely as it underlies the strange triumphalism of Eliot’s “humility is endless” under similar pressures of disenchantment.

Pritchett is even bolder in exaltation. It is as if the pure joy of Creation in epiphanic flourish of its beauties was, at golden moments, miracle enough to suppress the Gnostic impulse. Or to put it more simply, beauty proves the goodness of this world:

To a world—to a world shut down every word
holds gold. The transmigratory glory
of birds shimmer-floating
in the blue haze on high and the white air
of ten thousand miles
shining with the possibility of a true
language of form, naked and unapprised.
(from “Sonnet with a Stuttered Volta”)

Magniloquence again: “holds gold”; “blue haze on high”. In the final section of each of his Four Quartets, Eliot insists upon the refining power of words, reaching at last, through the higher keys, unabashedly, to that moment when ”the fire and the rose are one.” Who among our contemporaries would take a similar risk? Well, Pritchett clearly. The “shining…possibility of a true / language of form” makes it clear: in Sunderland, magniloquence is an efflorescence, however briefly, however rarely, of the Word.

One of the beauties of Sunderland is its forlorn but unflagging devotion to that efflorescence. In this consists its “almost successful” resistance to the dark allures of Gnosticism. Pritchett’s language is never wholly ceded to an adversarial world. In despair, the Gnostic turns an ascetic discipline outwards against Creation. It exalts its inner demons into princes. And we must admit that the exaltation is sometimes gorgeous, as in Pritchett’s “broken tassel… / lighting the lane to / the land of the abandoned.” Asceticism always runs the risk of such misprisions but has, also, a safeguard available to, and within, its harsh discipline—the via negativa. In each of Eliot’s Four Quartets, darkness menaces and very nearly overwhelms the poetry at some point, and it is just then (thanks perhaps to his close reading of St. John of the Cross) that Eliot invokes the cures and cadences of the Negative Way: “And what you do not know is the only thing you know / And what you own is what you do not own / And where you are is where you are not” (from “East Coker”).

Dispossession becomes a form of waking, “a wholly new start.” Time and again, the Four Quartets, refreshed by dispossession, find their way back to the Affirmative Way. The allusive brilliance of Sunderland can be likewise discerning, likewise disciplined and refreshed. In one of his book’s very finest poems, “Negation,” Pritchett imagines—“envisions” might be more accurate—a world at the vanishing point and the Word’s phenomenal resistance to that vanishing:

So the things of this world flicker
flare and fade out—what of it?
Only the word alone can keep the space
between world and desire, between the earth
as seen and the earth about to vanish.

From the surface of last scattering
distance and immolation. Measure
that uplifts and diminishes, taking
shape as the idea of formation.
An enfolding of all our circumstances.

Say the sacred evolves from this.
Sound of a cloud passing and
no rain. The meaning of being all
foam and radiation. The stones shining
in their profane haloes.

It is in stanzas such as these that I feel most keenly, and most companionably, the heroic quality of Pritchett’s book. The haloes are “profane” but not profaned. Impermanence and immolation menace but cannot take the measure of this world. Radiation is a radiance, nevertheless and because. The meanings “flicker” upon the brink of annihilation. Here, all is suspended but not quite surrendered, not yet.

And still, neither does the “almost successfully” of Stevens surrender its hold upon the visions of Sunderland. Despite a splendid resistance, “Negation” closes with “The idle amen of a crow”—hardly an unequivocal affirmation of the Affirmative Way. We are left in suspense. But far from disappointment or chagrin, what I take with me out of the vivid and severally incomparable regions of Sunderland is a substantial delight and great eagerness to read what comes next. There are worlds in the balance, and I trust Pritchett. In his Norton Lectures, Eliot averred that “it is an advantage to mankind in general to live in a beautiful world.” Pritchett can, in the best of these poems, press that advantage to the very edge of perfection, as in his sonnet “Combustible Light”:

To take tea by the vase of daffodils and say:
“Let us live this way forever.”
To mean by a bowl of oranges and a small blue table
the entrance to another life.
To imagine it as a single letter.
That could hold the dust of this fading light.
These things make an entrance. They form the vowels
for red tiles, a glass of water, or the sun stringing its vine
from porch to window.
Abiding in the hum of freeway
the fragrance of wisteria and honeysuckle.
From the clamor of things
to make a blue letter for the day.
Shelter for the falling of our lives through this age.

Here, the world assembles a sheltering word from the sensations, the plain and lettered beauties of the day. And I believe the shelter will endure.

Donald Revell is the author of sixteen collections of poetry, most recently White Campion (2021) and The English Boat (2018). He has also published six volumes of translations from the French, including Apollinaire’s Alcools, Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, Laforgue’s Last Verses, and Verlaine's Songs without Words. Revell’s critical writings include Sudden Eden: Essays; Essay: A Critical Memoir; The Art of Attention; and Invisible Green: Selected Prose. Winner of the PEN USA Translation Award and two-time winner of the PEN USA Award for Poetry, he has also won the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize and is a former Fellow of the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.