It can never by conferred, accepted, or for that matter, usurped-as a result of which language acquires a sanctity like that of life itself. Of couse the irony is that literature, including this poem, often is a kind of double-dealing, but the further point is that misuse of language, whether via rhetoric or any other linguistic means, was never a right in the first place, particularly for poets. For instance, in “Luck’s Shining Child,” the poet-teacher decompresses both himself and his pedagogy: Moreover, because the speaker allowed the reader to have something on him, he relinquished the right to put on the kind of rhetorical moves that tempt lesser poets to dispense with the spade work of making meaning. Garrett created an ambient sympathy through the revelation of imperfection, and this creation in turn modeled a larger sympathy-one of his cornerstone themes. As a device, being in-the-know serves not only as check against the grandiosity that commonly shadows our ideals, it also configures the speaker in such a way that we stand to calibrate the truth of his expressions against a known measure. But his best poems succeed and are most humanly appealing when, as was not infrequently the case, the most gracious moments were scaled back by modest and witty admissions of his own shortcomings.

Poet David Rigsbee offered this remembrance of Southern novelist and poet George Garrett, who died at the end of May 2008, at 78.Ī poet of Jonsonian inclinations-which is to say, classical (in form), sardonic, epigrammatic, and academic (in the best sense), George Garrett found an itinerant sophistication and wordliness sometimes inadequate for coming to terms with the world’s savvy indifference to the characteristics he valued most: sympathy, tenderness, wit, public responsibility, and the sanctity of private passion.

Death of the Fox by George Garrett