{"id":9084,"date":"2018-01-22T18:47:08","date_gmt":"2018-01-22T17:47:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=9084"},"modified":"2018-01-30T19:37:48","modified_gmt":"2018-01-30T18:37:48","slug":"douglas-crase-the-astropastorals-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=9084","title":{"rendered":"Douglas Crase, The Astropastorals<\/em>, reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"

Douglas Crase, The Astropastorals<\/em>, (Pressed Wafer $10.00)<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a>Douglas Crase\u2019s The Astropastorals<\/em> is a slim pamphlet of the ten poems Crase has chosen to publish since he published The Revisionist<\/em> in 1981. The Revisionist<\/em> gained immediate praise; its dustjacket had puffs from John Ashbery and James Merrill. David Kalstone introduced a reading by Ashbery and Crase by suggesting that The Revisionist<\/em> \u2018appeared with that sense of completeness of utterance and identity that must have come with the first books of Wallace Stevens – Harmonium – and Elizabeth Bishop – North and South.\u2019 Its reviewers ranged from Jay Parini and Margorie Perloff, to William H. Pritchard. In his major History of Modern Poetry, David Perkins comments that in The Revisionist<\/em> \u2018[Crase] has absorbed Ashbery. I am thinking of Crase\u2019s bland tone, his occasional deliberate vagueness as to who is addressed or what is referred to, the clear, even intelligence of his writing which is continually observant, thoughtfully generalising, mildly witty, and at the same time, comfortable, friendly and low-keyed.\u2019 Perkins goes on to suggest that \u2018Crase\u2019s subject matter [is] American history as it is reflected in particular places\u2019 but that \u2018the deeper meaning of his poetry lies in his vision of process, of unresting, somehow orderly change in natural things and also in buildings, cities or \u201chistory.\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n

I have quoted Perkins at length to suggest that with this one book, Crase established an immediate place in contemporary American poetry, which was followed by almost complete silence. If you want to obtain The Revisionist now<\/em>, you are going to have to pay a lot of money for second hand copies and even more for new ones, as this major book has been out of print for a very long time. In a note which accompanies the poems, Crase himself seems to suggest that the pieces in The Astropastorals<\/em> come from a period between 1979, before the publication of The Revisionist<\/em>, and the year 2000. If that is the case, then somewhere a major American voice has lost its way. And a major book is, unconscionably, out of print.<\/p>\n

The Revisionist<\/em> begins with the poem \u2018America began in houses\u2019, which, itself, starts \u2018Unlike other countries, this one\/ Begins in houses, specific houses and the upstairs room\/ Where constitutions vibrate in the blockfront drawers,\/ A Queen Anne highboy, or maybe the widow\u2019s walk\/ On a farmhouse hundreds of miles inland and believed\/ By the family to be a lookout for Indians though clearly\/It was a pioneer\u2019s conceit, fresh as the latest politics\/ From home:\u2019 This might seem Perkins\u2019 \u2018American history as it is reflected in particular places.\u2019 Crase moves, cinematically, from the camera moving into the house, surveying some of the content and then moving out into that perennial American subject, the American landscape and man and woman\u2019s place in it. And the style is one of long, flowing sentences, and the slight archaism of the capital letter at the start of each line. <\/p>\n

The poems in The Astropastorals<\/em> have stylistic similarities to those in The Revisionist<\/em>. The first word in the line emphasises its start with that capital letter. There are a lot of long sentences, but there are also short poems, and short sentences, too. The opening poem, \u2018Once the sole province\u2019 continues, \u2018\u2026of genius at home,\/ What it this, our idea of access to a larger world\/ That invented the world itself (first, second,\/ Third) past accuracy we are bound to inhabit now\/ As targets,\u2019. Below, Crase continues, \u2018For we are either ready or\/ We must be ready or not, an expensive mix\/ of life-based chemistry perpetually on the verge\/ Of going to heaven in a vapor, and almost making it,\u2019.<\/p>\n

This kind of futurology might seem a long way from that earlier world of blockfront drawers and Queen Anne highboys. And there is a sense that Crase\u2019s gaze has moved from the past to the future. However, as Perkins notes, there is the way in which, in the earlier poem, Crase\u2019s imagination invests the situation with the process of the imagination of that time. The widow\u2019s walk through Indian territory is, itself, a \u2018conceit\u2019 which has its analogies in an orientation towards to an idealised \u2018home\u2019 which has its own politics, its own imagined set of negotiated power relations. Here, Crase plays with an ironizing view of the pioneer past. The Astropastorals\u2019<\/em> \u2018Once the Sole Province\u2019 contains similar ironies. Its future worlds are also the products of a \u2018genius at home\u2019. This genius at home has pushed into other world \u2018as targets\u2019; targets in both senses here: targets of planetary exploration, but also targets in themselves, targets of the attacks of others, as the pioneers saw themselves as targets of \u2018Indians.\u2019 <\/p>\n

If Perkins is correct, then Crase\u2019s view of the human process is one of moving towards and away from safety \u2018perpetually on the verge\u2019; a projection of humanity\u2019s impulses for both home making and home threatening, particularly the \u2018home\u2019 of the Other. As Crase puts it in the poem \u2018Dog Star Sale\u2019, \u2018All involved on the earth with your chores of pollution\/ And never likely to pause\/ Let alone practice what we\/ Observe: as far as you touch\/ Other worlds, that much you save yours\u2019. Crase seeks to observe \u2018other worlds\u2019 and implores us to preserve them. The Astropastorals<\/em> might play on both the idea of pastoral poetry by presenting a heavily ironized, interplanetary idyll, which \u2018meets their needs in scale: shops,\/ Ammo dumps, taverns and houses of prayer.\u2019 \u2018Theme Park\u2019. But there is also the sense of these pieces as pastoral letters, again speaking ironically to the spiritual needs of those who inhabit the future. If both these kinds of pastorals are ironized, then Crase seems to suggest that we have to work harder at preserving what we have, not so much \u2018astropastorals\u2019 as \u2018anti-astropastorals\u2019. <\/p>\n

Ian Pople<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Douglas Crase, The Astropastorals, (Pressed Wafer $10.00) Douglas Crase\u2019s The Astropastorals is a slim pamphlet of the ten poems Crase has chosen to publish since he published The Revisionist in 1981. The Revisionist gained immediate praise; its dustjacket had puffs from John Ashbery and James Merrill. David Kalstone introduced a reading by Ashbery and Crase […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nDouglas Crase, The Astropastorals, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=9084\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Douglas Crase, The Astropastorals, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Douglas Crase, The Astropastorals, (Pressed Wafer $10.00) Douglas Crase\u2019s The Astropastorals is a slim pamphlet of the ten poems Crase has chosen to publish since he published The Revisionist in 1981. The Revisionist gained immediate praise; its dustjacket had puffs from John Ashbery and James Merrill. David Kalstone introduced a reading by Ashbery and Crase […]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=9084\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2018-01-22T17:47:08+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2018-01-30T18:37:48+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/i64.tinypic.com\/261g8j4.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Ian Pople\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Ian Pople\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=9084\",\"url\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=9084\",\"name\":\"Douglas Crase, The Astropastorals, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2018-01-22T17:47:08+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2018-01-30T18:37:48+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#\/schema\/person\/1e4c20066db3d71097155619e6d443a9\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=9084#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=9084\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=9084#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Douglas Crase, The Astropastorals, reviewed by Ian Pople\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#website\",\"url\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/\",\"name\":\"The Manchester Review\",\"description\":\"The Manchester Review\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#\/schema\/person\/1e4c20066db3d71097155619e6d443a9\",\"name\":\"Ian Pople\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/wp-includes\/images\/blank.gif\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/wp-includes\/images\/blank.gif\",\"caption\":\"Ian Pople\"},\"description\":\"Ian Pople's Spillway is published by Anstruther Press.\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?author=21\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Douglas Crase, The Astropastorals, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=9084","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Douglas Crase, The Astropastorals, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review","og_description":"Douglas Crase, The Astropastorals, (Pressed Wafer $10.00) Douglas Crase\u2019s The Astropastorals is a slim pamphlet of the ten poems Crase has chosen to publish since he published The Revisionist in 1981. The Revisionist gained immediate praise; its dustjacket had puffs from John Ashbery and James Merrill. David Kalstone introduced a reading by Ashbery and Crase […]","og_url":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=9084","og_site_name":"The Manchester Review","article_published_time":"2018-01-22T17:47:08+00:00","article_modified_time":"2018-01-30T18:37:48+00:00","og_image":[{"url":"http:\/\/i64.tinypic.com\/261g8j4.jpg"}],"author":"Ian Pople","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Ian Pople","Est. reading time":"5 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=9084","url":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=9084","name":"Douglas Crase, The Astropastorals, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review","isPartOf":{"@id":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#website"},"datePublished":"2018-01-22T17:47:08+00:00","dateModified":"2018-01-30T18:37:48+00:00","author":{"@id":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#\/schema\/person\/1e4c20066db3d71097155619e6d443a9"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=9084#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=9084"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=9084#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Douglas Crase, The Astropastorals, reviewed by Ian Pople"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#website","url":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/","name":"The Manchester Review","description":"The Manchester Review","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#\/schema\/person\/1e4c20066db3d71097155619e6d443a9","name":"Ian Pople","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/wp-includes\/images\/blank.gif","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/wp-includes\/images\/blank.gif","caption":"Ian Pople"},"description":"Ian Pople's Spillway is published by Anstruther Press.","url":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?author=21"}]}},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2PuXo-2mw","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9084"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9084"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9084\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9150,"href":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9084\/revisions\/9150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}