Riffs and Reciprocities: Prose Pairs (review)

Book Reviews207 protest, want to let this insolent driver know that his fare has already looked the devil in the eye and paid him his due. Reviewed by Marc Sheehan Riffs and Reciprocities: Prose Pairs by Stephen Dunn WW Norton & Company, 1998 112 pages, cloth $19.95; paper $12.00 Sometimes poets discover forms and techniques that seem to release their best energies: C. K.WiUiams's long-Une eight-line poems in Flesh and Blood, WiUiam S. Merwin's omission of punctuation beginning in The Carrier of Ladders, John Berryman's characters and diction in the Dream Songs. Stephen Dunn's prose pairs in his new book Riffs and Reciprocities do something similar by combining the speed and unexpected jumps ofhis earlier work with the conversational voice ofhis more recent poems. The results are dazzUng. The book consists offorty-five prose pairs, divided into three sections mat might be tided, very broadly, MoraUty, Love, MortaUty. The two halves ofthese prose pairs rattle against each other Uke dice, generating as many combinations and throwing offiUuminating sparks.The titles themselves set the circus ofideas in motion: "Technology/Memory,""Passion/Paradox,""Flirtation/Revision," "Reading/Erasure."We head into them curious to see how the two titles are connected. The connection between "Passion" and "Paradox," for example, is revealed early in the first half. "Passion" begins: "The Last Supper over, Christ's long night about to begin: suffering was what passion meant." Then it moves from The Passion to passion: "Just vestiges ofthat meaning now; our lovers' contorted mouths, their groans—what might be, ifwe didn't know better, pain." Ofcourse, we think, as the connection is made—and yes, what a paradox that we use the same word for two such different things. Then the pair turns again to find similarities between Christ's suffering and a lover's, and yet again to connect passion and paradox: "Only passion can make us feel as momentarUy freed as paradox can. But paradox also does less consoUng work. ..." Sometimes the surprise comes with what foUows the tide, as in "SubUme": "LasVegas. Shut in for a weekend with slots, roulette, blackjack, craps"—a description we might expect to find instead under the title of its mate, "Vulgar." "Syntax" quotes a bridge column, and then "Mimesis" follows its sentence structures to create an entirely different story. 208Fourth Genre Dunn refers to these works as prose paragraphs rather than prose poems, but since each one is a single paragraph long, that limit makes them feel like stanzas—Uttle rooms, enclosures that raise the compression and intensity of the pieces to the level ofpoetry. They are reflective and meditative, but they move at the speed of handbaU rather than a walk in the park. Riffs and Reciprocities describes the action perfecdy. Each paragraph has aU the improvisatory gUnt and play ofajazz solo, and that energy is shaped and ampUfied by its opposite number on the facing page. The form here, the entwined prose pairs, is powerful because it iUuminates the way we construct and reconstruct the world the live in, defining something by saying what it is not. This can lead to endless hairspUtting but can also—as in Riffs and Reciprocities—bring out the best in us: an openness to ambiguity and complexity, empathy for other points ofview, and a wiUingness to live with ambiguity and uncertainty. The last piece in the book, "Acceptance," sustains this balancing act from its opening sentence ("Certainly not ofthings as they are . . .") to its concluding paradox: "FaU down seven times, stand up eight." Reviewed by Sharon Bryan Peace at Heart: An Oregon Country Life by Barbara Drake Oregon State University Press, 1998 192 pages, paper, $15.95 Growing up on a Midwestern farm surrounded by corn and soybean fields and plagued by poor weather patterns and unlucky chance taught me that smaU-time farmers do not work the land solely for profit because profit is rarely had. As a child I never questioned what possessed my father to come home from his dayjob as an accountant and spend endless hours in the barn or in the adjacent field. As an adult living in a city, that question now occupies my mind...