Sea Change: Poems (review)

reviews 149 tradiction leads to what seems to me the great gamble of de Lauretis' book: her attempt to reread Bad Timing, seemingly a tale of intense male oppression and suppression of femininity , for marks of feminine resistance and subversion. De Lauretis' move is no doubt a controversial one, but it does lead us to think again about the ties of event to interpretation. This is part of the project of the whole book: to make us move away from any notion of meaning as inherent in things, to one of meaning as a negotiation between things and highly specific social interpretative communities. Over the last few years, the most exciting development in film theory has been its attempt to engage with the movement of history in all its complexity: the history of material institutions, but also the history of our psychic involvement with and investment in those institutions. The three books here represent a direct continuation of that development; for anyone interested in ongoing attempts to understand the ideology and sexuality of our contemporary cultural forms, these books are essential reading. DANA POLAN Sea Change: Poems by Christopher Howell, with illustrations by Carol Jablonsky. Seattle: L'Epervier, 1985. 64 pp. $6.95 (paper). Christopher Howell prefaces the first section ofSea Change with a quotation from Michel Butor's Passage de Milan: And the beasts of the desert awaited the coming of night on the other side of the cUffs. You could see the light through the wings of the soaring birds. In autumn the storks came from those faraway lands, they said, where I am now, and where I have never seen any. In so doing, he alerts us to the background against which the drama of these poems can and must be seen; for each is a personal exploration driven by the need for a shift of feeling arising out of inner conflict that has its parallel in the modern world's love affair with the possibilities of the New World. The myths, the legends, the glittering Cities of Gold or the heart-easing Belle Isles—the images ("they said") that inspire the pioneers—stand, fall, or are changed in the course of those journeys. The book emerges, poem by poem, coherent within the archetype of human life as a search for new identities. What Howell brings to these poems is a powerful and delicate sensibility capable of solo and choral voices. In poems like "Three Deaths and Another Start," he locates the impulse of his song at the point where the orchards that the grandfathers who first emigrated to the New World transformed from wilderness are being tractored into suburbs by land developers: If my bent grandfather sat here knowing the exact pace at which life is undone, he did not tell me. . . So I tell myself I am the first man here in a doomed face, seeing the trees go down like the young go down in war. I am the first last sayer of this time in a small space that has done no harm, nor raised a grandfather back to hold the dozers in their muttering place. . . And the farm slips 150 the minnesota review from my fingers while I watch shadows roll out their graceful tangled art, and say goodbye. It's time for another start. The way Howell links trees going down and young men going down in war reminds us that Sea Change is very much a book shaped by his Vietnam experience; it enacts the way he and so many of the young men he knew during that time took on faith the truth of what "they said." Unlike his previous book, Though Silence: The Ling Wei Texts, which arises out of a fictional premise—a 14th-century Chinese courtier is exiled for writing poems critical of the Emperor's plans for war—the poems in Sea Change take a direct, autobiographical tack. Poems Uke "The Voyage" create the sense of 19th-century colonialist wars, and others Uke "Chance" and "Liberty & Ten Years of Return" transfer the imagery of senseless violence into Vietnam terms. "What are we fightin' for?" could be the refrain played again and again between these poems. One...