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combination, amounts in many ways to something rather desperado a high-wire feat. There is nothing in current American poetry like Garrigue's handling of the complex and the real-as in another poem in the book "The Improbable-The Particular / The Probable-The Universal" where she suddenly says:

...I'd have
The paradoxes met!
I'd entertain the contradictions
We admire in books, I'd make an art
Of wedding opposites the hate....

These present a kind of mind-cracking profundity, and bear a cast of Eastern thought. Like the ancient Chinese poet, Lao-tze, perhaps.
In "Studies for an Actress" the actress is very actual. The poem was written after Garrigue had seen the famous Galina Vishnevskaya perform in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, in 1969. Metaphorically, the actress is ourselves, as part of the modern world, with a sophisticated knowledge about performance-and what we do in life, with our own strengths and weaknesses. I won't try to capsule it here. The whole reads like a capsule novel. As the poem advances, it shows that the struggle in a lifetime is not between life and death, but between our mortal being and the creative principal. This is different from Hamlet, and it's an essentially twentieth-century torment. In our knowledge about how to perform, should we yield to another kind of weakness-which is self-doubt, cynicism? "And what," says the garrigue poem, which throws out any sentimental aspects, "what but the mind sustains the cross-grained theme?"
It is a new kind of "To be, or not to be?" In Garrigue, the warring elements are not solved. But rather they are dissolved, and in an extraordinarily adroit fashion. Of the actress:

She prays if nothing else to be
In some dissolving medium of light,
A pond that's set to catch the arrowy beams,
Reflective and odedient as that.

An the last three lines:

She prays to praise. She prays to be
Condensed now to one desire
As if is were very life performing her.