The Killdeer Crying: Selected Poems of William Barney ed. by Dave Oliphant (review)

Reviews 325 The Killdeer Crying: Selected Poems of William Barney. Edited and intro­ duced by Dave Oliphant. (Prickly Pear Press, 2132 Edwin St., Ft. Worth, Texas 76110, 1977. 74 pages, $5.00.) If it is something of a cliché to announce the arrival of a regional artist worthy of national acclaim, still the cliché seems warranted in the case of Texas poet William Barney. He has been writing splendid poetry for over twenty years, and now The Killdeer Crying, a handsome volume, brings together poems from the late 1940’s to the present in an attempt to provide a carefully selected basis for evaluating Barney’s accomplishment. Dave Oliphant, a poet himself, asserts in his introduction that Texas poetry may be said to begin with Barney. I know of no poet whose work I would bring forth to challenge this claim. In a time when introspection, confession, and free-form poetics char­ acterize much of American verse, Barney looks and sounds traditional, profoundly humorous, old-fashioned. If an early poem like “Cross Timbers” echoes Robert Frost too lovingly (“Forests of fir, and boughs bowed down with snow / I never knew; but these are woods I know”), many a later poem vividly demonstrates the vitality of the Frost / E. A. Robinson tradition adapted to the contours and colors of the Southwestern landscape. Like Frost’s, Barney’s aesthetic honors toughmindedness and discipline. “On a Detail from Audubon,” from his first book, Kneel From the Stone (1952), articulates an uncompromising ideal: A soft stroke lames the line, depraves. The fierce detail enhances, saves. In language made up of both folk idioms and the more formal, elevated diction of a high poetic tradition, Barney treats the commonplace materials at his disposal from years of traveling about Texas as a postalinspector. Thus thefine vernacular poem “Bedded Coals” gives us thevoice of a Northern woman who made the mistake of marrying south: No, we go in on Mondays. I like it so. And even then he gets to making talk while I sit in the sun and freckle. Does he know a woman will ever fight just to stay reasonably white? Not him. It’s no distress to him, wedlock. Or, in another mode, there is the eloquence of a late poem, “The Cranes at Muleshoe,” which because of its theme but not from any derivativeness might have been called “The Idea of Order at Muleshoe.” I quote only the first four lines of the great last stanza: 326 Western American Literature Clamoring each to the other, coarsely they exhort all to discover place; they croak of joy when all shall move as one in marshalled uproar choiring the high plains. To read Barney’s poetry is to discover place in the best sense of regional art. Place becomes the world. DON GRAHAM, University of Texas at Austin Who Is Teddy Villanova? By Thomas Berger. (New York: Delacorte Press/ Seymour Lawrence, 1977. 247 pages.) Thomas Berger carved himself a minor niche in Western American literature thirteen years ago with Little Big Man, a fantasy about the' last survivor of Custer’s last stand that became an admired Arthur Penn film starring Dustin Hoffman. Since then, Berger has done little to improve or even retain his position. His latest fiction makes one wonder how he could ever have been taken seriously at all. Certainly Western fans will find nothing for them in this totally contrived book. With its multiple concealed identities, incredible coincidences, faulty assumptions and pale puns, Who Is Teddy Villanova? reminds one of nothing so much as a 1930’s “B” chase film, in which the whole flimsy situation masquerading as a plot could have been instantly resolved if the characters had paid any attention at all to what others w'ere saying. The resemblance to 30’s flicks is heightened, surely deliberately, by the cliffhanging endings of each of the fifteen chapters, which are deflatingly resolved at the beginning of the next. There were usually exactly fifteen chapters also in the adventure serials that lured kids off the street into the Saturday matinees in those days. Berger has updated this tired formula with fashionable references to dope-pushing and qualified it for “adult...