Title: MOIRE
Author: Eugene Richie
Publisher: The Groundwater Press, New York

Neoromantic is a term coined by critics for contemporary music that has returned to the seemingly lost ideals of melody, tonality and traditional forms, thereby reputing serialism, minimalism and other "horrors" of music's recent past and reassuring the foes of modernism. But other critics have been quick to point out that the parallel with the nineteenth century is a specious one, since the earlier romantics were the revolutionaries of their day, rebelling against an outmoded classicism; while the neoromanticism of today is backward looking, conservative, even though such an attempt in a modernist context might be seen as daring and unorthodox.

I am not aware that the term has been used to describe poetry, perhaps because there is no neo-romantic poetry. True, some critics have seen a return to a more traditional and structured poetic norm, but this norm would seem to be the classicism of a Frost or a Housman rather than the risk-talking Holderlin. This truly romantic poetry, whose very right to exist is to constant doubt and which thrives in a hostile climate fraught with paradox any mystery, is not very common today. Eugene Richie's is one example. His generalized but bizarre and pointed landscapes seem familiar to us from our memories of Poe and Shelley; so does the erotic, dreamlike atmosphere wherein a beloved is always present but only at times visible, evoked in telling fragments like the other worldly setting. It is therefore a shock to trip over fragments of today-Forty-second Street, a Thunderbird, a Paris boutique, which wrench us back, reminding us that our "great unendowed, unfurnished, unentertained and unentertaining continent" (the phrase is from Van Wyck Brooks' essay "Henry James: The American Scene") hasn't pulled up stakes and disappeared overnight.

John Ashbery