Passion and Defiance: Film in Italy from 1942 to the Present (review)

130 the minnesota review swallow it." In the book's final poem we are told that "It's not me shouting at no one / in Cadillac Square: it's God roaring inside me, afraid / to be alone." Lawrence Joseph's urban poems are powerful and passionate. They can help us admit into American poetry the complex Arabic perspective that is already part of American society . The poems are also very good, and the best of them certainly deserve to be anthologized and widely taught and read. In the dedicatory poem ("In Contrast") of Everyday Life, Greg Kuzma tells us that "the large statement / I leave to / others" and that "for myself / simply / I reserve / the view from the patio." He evidently aims for a mean in this book of simple poems about the poet's vision of ordinary and private life in a small town on the plains (and the poet's fate in that setting). But the poems and the voice we hear in them are consistently rather flat. I think Kuzma in these verses has simply aimed too low, restricted his own talent too much. There are darker, more bitter moods and moments struggling to rise to the surface in this book. These are poems more interesting for what they try to repress than for what they say or imply. Oddly, I get at times hints of Robert Herrick's verse, and from Kuzma's whole book a subtle suggestion of Herrick's single volume. But here there isn't the sweetness or the careful sense of limitation and music of Herrick's country poems—and no wonder, since the time when Herrick's kind of poem could be honestly written has long passed. Kuzma, in these poems at least, hasn't made peace with his fellow townspeople or with the plains—which is good. But as I read through the four parts of Everyday Life I find myself wanting to hear about what has been censored. Kuzma's work (in this volume) is a poetry of statement at times suggestive, too, of some of Wallace Stevens' poems; but the ontological concern of Stevens is missing. Occasionally, I feel that a poem is asking me (as do many of William Stafford's poems) to accept it as a kind of Heideggerian moment; but it finally doesn't work (if it was intended). Questions of being simply don't seem to be at issue. Throughout the book, there is a too subdued undercurrent of distaste for the small town and for living in it, a sense of abandonment and entrapment . The book of poems that underlies Everyday Life is a much more interesting one—but that book hasn't yet been written. RICHARD DANIELS Passion and Defiance: Film in Italy from 1942 to the Present by Mira Liehm. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 3% pp. $29.75 (cloth). As yet there exists no interesting, complete history of Italian cinema in English. This is not surprising, considering that writing one would be for most people a life's work. Minimal qualifications would be a thorough knowledge of the Italian language and culture, including some acquaintance with dialects; a detailed mastery of the country's labyrinthine politics and history, as well as of the interaction between political interest groups and filmmakers ; a sensitivity to the national traditions in painting, music, and literature; the theoretical expertise required to handle the more technical writings of film critics and the philosophers who influenced them; and, last but not least, an intimate acquaintance with all of Italian film: the canon, of course, but also the genres—the second-rate melodramas, spaghetti westerns, comedies, etc. Mira Liehm's severely flawed book does not satisfy the need for such a history, but it does have some merits. One is the opening chapter, a brief survey of pre-World War II Italian film emphasizing the fascist period. It's amazing how many knowledgeable Americans think that Rossellini was the first Italian to pick up a camera. Yet this mistake is reviews 131 understandable, since the Italians themselves have managed to lose or forget many great silent films and their underrated fascist offspring. Liehm discusses, for example, some...