The Complete Short Stories. Vol. I, The Christmas Stories by Anthony Trollope, ed. by Betty Jane Breyer (review)

318ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW Roger Weaver. The Orange and Other Poems. Portland, OR: Press-22, 1978. 52p. The mandarin charm of Roger Weaver's first book of poems, whose previous publications are documented in the front matter, is reflective of its durable intellectual construction. The exoticism no doubt complements the poet's work as editor; Roger I. Weaver and Joseph Bruchac edited Aftermath: An Anthology of Poems in English from Africa, Asia, and the Carribbean (Greenfield Review Press, 1977). The prefatory poem on "The Orange" establishes the main theme of The Orange and Other Poems: the prime, conceived as indiscrete or delicately separated segments of a curved spectrum that moves from the primary by means of an only qualitative leap to the optimal, and so on, to the primordial. According to the poet, the ultimate is not of necessity achieved, for it always is. Thus, the orange is a metaphor for life in its myriad manifestations, and "The Orange" is an invitation to the reader to cultivate in a quasi-Eliotian rose-garden-like space the secretjoy felt by the Kierkegaardian knight of faith, and finally, to celebrate the sanctity of childhood, partly because it is a time of discovery. In this collection of poems, each verse conveys a refreshing perception, each poem a wholesome integration of image or idea. The vitality of the book is due to the variety of subjects taken up in the limited number of 450 lines of verse. Though the open free-verse stanza form remains constant (with the exception of the concrete poem "Totem Pole"), the range of material extends from a cerebral look at "Men" to "Issei Bicentennial" ("The marooned azaleas in Mr. Ito's garden") to "Another Writing Problem" ("Tell whether your idea of the Infinite"). The book's focus on American heritage surfaces in such lyrics as "American Poetry," "Sexual Politics," "Beethoven Was Deaf," "Tribuía, Tribulatum (for James Agee)," "The North American as Landscape," "Blues for Eric, Age 4," and "1897 Picture." Every poem in the text challenges the reader. The book uses what Ezra Pound calls Logopoeia, the dance of the intellect among words. The concepts tendered may very well provoke "irregular murmurs rare as the exotic / gathering in Caucasian eyes." JVAiVCY WATANABE University of Oklahoma Anthony Trollope. The Complete Short Stories. Vol. I, The Christmas Stories. Ed. by Betty Jane Breyer. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1979. 248p. This beautifully-designed book is first in a series making available the almost forgotten short stories of the nineteenth-century English novelist Anthony Trollope. Of its eight stories, four deal with small domestic crises: Is mistletoe worth the embarrassment it might cause a girl with her family's house guest, an acquaintance she secretly admires? Is a man who dismisses Christmas as a bore worthy for a suitor? Can love overcome two fathers' objections to prospective sons-in-law of lower status than they had anticipated for their daughters? Can a brother-in-law, offended when asked to cosign a promissory note, forgive and be forgiven? These four stories, slight as they are, nevertheless demonstrate Trollope's skill in depicting and differentiating young women. The other four stories have a wider scope. "The Widow's Mite" concerns a symbolic self-deprivation during the "cotton famine," when severe depression affected England because cotton was unavailable for manufacturing during the BOOK REVIEWS319 American Civil War. "The Two Generals" of another story are brothers from Kentucky , in their twenties, on opposite sides in the Civil War, and in love with thé same girl. "Catherine Carmichael; or, Three Years Running" is a somber tale, difficult to forget. A Scotch girl, orphaned and destitute in New Zealand after her father's death, marries an unloving, middle-aged distant relative who offers her a home. Her bleak existence and her hopelessness are vividly portrayed. By contrast, "Christmas at Thompson Hall" is a great comic story dealing with a woman's accidentally applying a mustard plaster to the chest of a sleeping stranger in a hotel in Paris. Trollope's short stories often seem tales or anecdotes, less tightly constructed and less complex than a modern reader expects. Symbolism, when it appears, tends to be explicit. His...