Learn to Love the Haze by Robert Roripaugh, and: Sundance at Dusk by Al Purdy (review)

Reviews 327 Learn to Love the Haze. By Robert Roripaugh. (Vermillion, South Dakota: Spirit Mound Press, 1976. 60 pages, $2.95.) Sundance at Dusk. By A1 Purdy. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976. 112 pages, $4.95.) Both of these volumes contain a poem that inventories the contents of a city dump. These meditations on the waste of contemporary life becoming landscape indicate their authors’ propensity to see human values from the long perspectives of geological process, time, and locale. Drawing easily, for example, from the vocabulary of paleontology or of North American Indian mythology, both poets frequently place men within natural environ­ ments that expose the green futility of garden variety pretensions and ambitions. But the voices which carry this shared sense of limitation differ greatly, and the difference, I believe, determines the relative quality of the two books. Although Roripaugh is an established novelist, this is his first book of poems and he is understandably less bold in scope and range than Purdy, who has published over 20 books of poetry in the period since 1944. Yet Roripaugh’s restraint seems due less to inexperience than to a deliberate choice of decorums w'hich consistently inform and control his perceptions. The reader thus becomes confident that the voices of the poems never claim more than the poet has actually perceived or understood, and if the judg­ ments made are rarely startling or particularly forceful, they are invariably precise because obedient to the restraints of modesty and decency. It is furthermore just these restraints which shape the disciplined sensuality of Roripaugh’s imagery, especially in the opening sequence of ten love poems called “Yellow Willow.” This imagery succeeds in conveying passion exactly defined and made intensive by the very forms which contain and curb it. The general effect is impressive, a kind of erotic serenity which enacts the marriage of Wyoming and the Orient which Roripaugh touched on in his novel, A Fever for Living. The book succeeds, I think, because its poems are carefully crafted and because Roripaugh has learned that the restraints of craft are not necessarily barriers, but can themselves be fully expressive. By contrast with Roripaugh’s decorums, Purdy is deliberately inde­ corous, Impatient with every convention, free verse so free that it is often prose again, zinging from philosophical cant to obscenity in a single phrase, abandoning punctuation altogether, his poems are bound by no formal restraint except the direction of his own wandering attention. This freedom, and the amazing range of subjects it permits, seems best exercised by Purdy’s considerable skill as an anecdotalist — and he tells some fine stories. But if Purdy the raconteur is refreshingly indecorous, he is not immodest, and this combination weakens the collection. Confronted with incidents of social injustice, of the indifference of nature, or of his own aging, Purdy’s sense 328 Western American Literature of helplessness works to turn his voice on itself, calling attention to its own and its owner’s crochets; the effect is tedious as the voice becomes increas­ ingly garrulous and, on too many occasions, querulous as when Purdy begins to distrust poetry itself: “And in the face of their knowledge / all these mere words on paper / ring soundlessly in the vacuum of inattention / I know they mean nothing.” Here the voice labors to destroy its own authority, and in this book, it often succeeds. Purdy’s assaults on the restraints of craft are, then, so thorough that they finally overwhelm the poems in which they must be expressed. MORTON L. ROSS, University of Alberta Dance Me Outside. By W. P. Kinsella. (Canada: Oberon Press, 1977. 158 pages, $4.95.) Dance Me Outside is a vibrant and funny collection of stories by a new Canadian author, W. P. Kinsella. Written in the first person in a lean style, they concern an eighteen year old Indian named Silas Ermineskin who lives on a reserve just south of Edmonton, Alberta. Silas is an impassive and resourceful kid, who, intent on his future, trains doggedly at a government technical school to be a mechanic. He shrugs off an ever-present prejudice that looms large as the distant Rocky Mountains. Traditionally, education is his only out...