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137 REVIEWS be both necessary and liberating to abandon the field of"literature" altogether, to find those other voices out in the world. Working Lives is in effect an important example of the kind of work committed writers might be doing outside of literature; another, more distant yet more brilliant example is one-time noveUst Ronald Fraser's oral history of the Spanish Civil War, Blood of Spain (also in Pantheon hardbound and paperback). Without wishing to prescribe or proscribe any one kind of writing, for committed writers or anyone else, and without denying the extraordinary richness, variety, and beauty of the modernist principles and practices that stiU reign in the "house of (quality) fiction," we may still find it important at least to keep in mind the existence of these other non-literary options—and, returning full circle to the un-earnest fantasist who opened this review, to consider an earnest piece of advice to all committed writers, in the urgent, imperturbable, impersonal voice of this late poem: And I always thought: the very simplest words Must be enough. When I say what things are Uke Everyone's heart must be torn to shreds. That you'll go down if you don't stand up for yourself Surely you see that.' Fred Pfeii NOTES 1.Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht (London: New Left Books, 1977), p. 107. 2."Marxism and Historicism," in New Literary History, Vol. XI, no. I (Autumn 1979), p. 56. 3.Bertold Brecht: Poems 1913-1956, ed. WUlett, Mannheim, and Fried (London: Methuen, 1976), p. 452. Tom Wayman, Introducing Tom Wayman: Selected Poems 1973-1980. Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1980. $5.95 paper. While Tom Wayman's work wiU be known to readers of this magazine, his five books have all appeared in his native Canada, which means that Ontario Review Press (of New Jersey and Ontario) is now providing Americans with their first chance to read a body of Wayman's peotry. The selection is generous, 134 pages, and Wayman is a poet who fills pages. Introducing Tom Wayman gives us a series of accurate and moving reports on the conditions of North American Ufe. "North American" is a locution Canadians use to describe what they share with the United States: Area Codes, acid rain, mangled family Ufe, fast food franchises, an inequitable and shaky prosperity, and some good things Uke international publishing ventures. Wayman is best known for his poems about work. He has edited three collections of work poems, most recently Going for Coffee: Poetry on the Job, from Harbour Publishing. The first part of Introducing Tom Wayman has a good selection of work poetry under the title, "Industrial Music." While Gary Snyder has written very weU about logging, the "six hells of the engine room," and communal living, Wayman is interested in the factory system, the very core of industrial society, and the related system of unemployment insurance. Using techniques that recall Pablo Neruda at times, he makes an "impure poetry" out of the monotony, waste and confusion of the assembly Une. Sometimes, he tells us, the assembled products dont work when they roU off the Une. Wayman shows the frustrations, anger and violent behavior fostered by the factory system, but he also reveals the humor and spontaneous outbursts of genuine Ufe: the factory—which no government wants to abolish, he points out—has damaged people without turning them into interchangeable parts. One quality of Wayman's imagination that prevents him, for all his reasonable anger, from becoming tendentious is his obvious 138 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW delight (Uke Neruda) in the sheer physicaUty of things. He writes about the pleasures of good tools ("Tool Fondle") and about the journey of ore from mine to smelter to a bolt in a truck ("Neil Watt's Poem "). He wants to know how the world functions, and he tells us what he has found out in an imaginative way. He cares about the workings of the body, too, as the mind tries to coerce it' into the unnatural schedules of employment—see "Routines," a fine comedy of Cartesian dualism. The subject matter of the poems and the attitudes they reveal are so interesting that it would...

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