I get my mail when I see my family, once every two weeks, so until this last weekend I hadn't seen Dan Chiasson's curious review in Poetry, twice mentioned by Jeffrey Bahr, of Rhina Espaillat's Playing at Stillness. As it happens, the current Hudson Review was also waiting for me with Paul Makuck's review of the same book. If ever there were evidence that readers create the text, these two reviews are it.
After a few remarks about a controversy between himself and Adam Kirsch over the "conditions of modernity," Chiasson begins his review this way:
That an American person can write a poem about Queen Anne's lace without some acknowledgment, at some level of syntax, diction, tone, rhetoric, or form, that William Carlos Williams also wrote such a poem, and further that his poem is one of the seminal short lyrics of Modernism—this seems to me very peculiar.
But Chiasson's reaction seems even more peculiar to me. Here is the poem from Williams:
Queen-Anne's-Lace
Her body is not so white as
anemone petals nor so smooth—nor
so remote a thing. It is a field
of the wild carrot taking
the field by force; the grass
does not raise above it.
Here is no question of whiteness,
white as can be, with a purple mole
at the center of each flower.
Each flower is a hand's span
of her whiteness. Wherever
his hand has lain there is
a tiny purple blemish. Each part
is a blossom under his touch
to which the fibres of her being
stem one by one, each to its end,
until the whole field is a
white desire, empty, a single stem,
a cluster, flower by flower,
a pious wish to whiteness gone over—
or nothing.
It's a conventional comparison of a woman's body to a flower, beginning with an equally conventional denial of a comparison to a barely more conventional flower (what is modernist about this poem, other than the lack of meter and a line break after an indefinite article?), in which her body either responds with desire to "his touch" with a purple blemish (a bruise!) or is nothing. In fact, it's a pretty awful piece of work once past line six. Williams wrote some wonderful poems: this ain't among 'em.
But supposing it were, what beyond the title—and there are good reasons one can't copywrite a title—does the above poem share with Espaillat's?
Queen Anne's Lace
You rise, angelic, from green
meadows where the sun
beats its brass drum and shadows fall
like small change
out of the wind's pockets.
The noonday bird leans earthward
from his cloudy perch,
but you, whose feet are nailed with stones
to the brown
grain of the meadow, you
rise with clean upturned faces,
you levitate on
the scorching breath of summer, white
flightless wings
moving in place like prayer.
Once again, it's not really a poem about wildflowers, but Chiasson seems to think that it is. For him it's "images of 'angelic' flowers and 'prayerful' wings," and if we like it, then "by all means, have it." But these are very peculiar angels, their feet "nailed with stones," and they, the flowers, and the prayers only rise so far, since they're like "flightless wings / moving in place." Not much comfort there, in the "scorching breath of summer." I think there could be a lively argument over which of the two poems better reflects "the conditions of modernity."
Peter Makuck (editor of Tar River Poetry), seems to have read the book I read. One paragraph of his review begins "Her ambiguous attitude thowards the natural world reminds me of Frost more than anyone else," and he quotes lines from the sestina "Primitive Landscape":
Perhaps we were not meant to love a world
that fattens us for death, like greedy children.
Rhina Espaillat is indeed, as Chiasson surmises, "a delightful person," but though she clearly loves the world she portrays in her "Queen Anne's Lace," she has fewer illusions about it than Williams displayed in his.
This isn't the first time it's seemed to me that Chiasson is formally blinkered by his infatuation with the modernists, and it's amusing that the current Hudson also prints Charles Martin's terza rima "After 9/11."
To be fair, Chiasson's much more sensible here.
8:53:34 PM 
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