The Man From Maple Grove, and: Credits and Debits: Poems (review)

a coal camp inhabited now mostly by old people, Laska blends the elegiac with his economic and social critique: "Across the bend in the river/ is a wide piece of level land/ still owned by the Government ,/ with nothing on it/ but the foundation / of an Army camp./ If I had the money,/ I'd buy Terry/ and move it over there.' Barrett is a girl-watcher and star-gazer. In "Woman Playing a Jukebox," a poem I first read in—what, Newground?—he describes a woman ("her ass a damp valentine/ sagging in red slacks") who turns from the machine and "... carries her weight/ through smoke/ like a firegnancy/ the slightest praise could ather." Sometimes he watches from a distance, as in "A Winter Baptism," where he looks down from a bridge. Or he will turn from "strands of your hair/ rising softly/ as about your ankles/ your skirt blows taut" to "clouds in the west,/my neighbor's burning garden" ("Harpschord Music"); from ' plumes of smoke/ ris[ing] from the dark pond" to "the sun but a brushfire on the ridge" ("Woodgathering in Long Shadows"). Or from a November hillside he will look up at Mars "with its pink and rusty spark,/ and think just to be there/ and gazing here, so unaware,/ of how much woe and rapture,/ how much sorrow, how much hope/ a tiny star may hold" ("Mars on a Vivid Night"). Bob Snyder, whose We'll See Who's a Peasant appeared under the pseudonym Billy Greenhorn, can write a brief and highly charged lyric, such as "Grandma," in which he smokes a first cigarette from his grandmother's last pack of Phillip Morrises, found in her purse ("stiff as a weed in winter") in the attic, an act which separates "my life into childhood and age/ the blue brown smoke doing my heart good"; such as "Grossvater, ' in which he tells how his grandfather, a beloved old socialist, taught a split-tongued crow to say "all men are brothers." More characteristically, Snyder likes to jam words together, strain syntax, juxtapose the colloquial and the formal, as in "The Prodigal," which is a very different homecoming from Laska' s "Mstistry": "coming chill up the ridgesides / purple pour fills nghtoways/ noondark twitcheywotches the Pike/ . . . beer foam's quicklime spook/ not yet bubbles as a sec ago/ jukebox at the bopeep turnstile." This is his approach in "Doggnaw," "Night Racket," ("I heard you pardon me the goofgonk"), "Mexican standoff ("when I defend my old school ties/ there's a mip mop of thunder/ that dumps the dark insides out/ lets loose the white wha hunh," and others. Typically, too, Snyder looks down from a height, as in "View From the Catwalks" and, mostly notably, in "The Night Watch," where he is a "satellite watching/ lonesome cities lighting the Trans-Siberian Railway/ clusters of burnpipes on the Persian Gulf/ here they come there they go/ squidlights flooding the Sea of Japan/ and even though I'm a speechless object/ shoot fire I keep an eye on the whole planet/ ... the flames across the African grasslands/ Amazonia dotted with slash and burn." Barrett looking up at Mars; Laska concerned with Guatamala, Salvador, Argentina, Chile, Nicaragua, Panama ("If Stein is Right"), and with "The Lemurs of Madagascar"; Snyder keeping an eye on the whole planet—all in their distinctive ways write a poetry which is grounded in the local yet globally aware. These poems are not just the "new tuning " of the Northern West Virginia ("Norbilly") school; they are a three-way mirror reflecting contemporary reality. -Jim Wayne Miller McKee, Glenn. The Man From Maple Grove. Nightshade Press, PO Box 76, Troy, ME 04987, 1990. 22 pages. $5.00. 70 _____________. Credits and Debits: Poems. Lester Hoodlet Press, 34 Quarry Road, Apt. #15, Waterville, ME 04901. The Man From Maple Grove is a collection of free verse poems tightly unified around a son's inquiring into his past, particularly as it relates to his father. The father, unfortunately, can only help the son's search by functioning as a reminder of what was. The father, while alive in the poems, suffers so badly from the advanced stages of Alhzeimer...