My Seasons by Haniel Long (review)

Reviews 195 violence in some of the key works of contemporary Canadian literature; for the neophyte, it provides a taste that should whet the appetite for a closer look at the authors and books in question. Moss’s book deserves a place with The Bush Garden, Butterfly on a Rock and the other classics of criticism of Canadian Literature. JOHN DONAHUE Champlain Regional College, Montreal My Seasons. By Haniel Long. (Boise State University: Ahsahta Press, 1977. 52 pages, $2.50.) Haniel Long published his poetry chiefly between 1920 and 1945, a period midway in the story of what was called the “New Poetry,” a move­ ment proclaimed in the first issue of Poetry, A Magazine of Verse in 1912, which then shifted toward more innovative methods about the time T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets appeared in 1944. Whatever the so-called “new” movement meant, the leaders never intended to loosen the reins of form to the degree that “Projective Verse” and “Composition by Field” accom­ plished in the “Beat Generation” of poets led by Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg and others after 1945. In American versifying, this group established cadences and idioms unfamiliar before their time. That is why My Seasons, the memorial volume from the Ahsahta Press, is especially welcome. The tone and message (dare I use such words?) of verse by Haniel Long are both refreshing and inspirational. The beauty of phrases like “a glade where moonlight lies,” hilltops that are “forms of silence,” stillness “flowing like a stream,” and the bloom of fruit trees “floating like a mist” recall a time when poetry presented objects of beauty and enlarged the reader’s vision. Long’s “Inland Lake” carries the reader from Cape Cod with “golden dunes” and “tawny sands” to a hill on the Pacific where “dark trees lean their sprays over the edge” and the poet on the beach. It is not that My Seasons devotes poetry only to the moods of nature. Friends of Haniel Long and readers of his imaginative prose, in Pittsburgh Memoranda (1935) and Interlinear to Cabeza de Vaca (1936), know that his life concern was to produce harmony and goodwill in personal and social relationships. His poem “The Grist Mill,” reprinted from the volume by this title in 1945, describes a trip to an old mill where the water wheels ground grains of wheat into flour. For the poet, this process became a school of living where hands served the heart and both served other people. Another poem, “He Never Said What Wilderness It Was,” draws meaning from the report in the Bible that Christ left his followers to live alone for a period in the wilderness. Long expresses his belief that Christ 196 Western American Literature withdrew from men in order to return to them with greater faith in being together, as a master joins a workman, a father his sons, a husband his wife to serve together reciprocally. “In Our Great Fragile Cities” is a poem in which he describes the switchboard for telephones as a symbol of the fabric which holds speakers and listeners in contact as the process of interdepen­ dence. The poems of Haniel Long recall a poet who is being more widely read. His name is pronounced “han-eye-el” with the accent on the second syllable. The word is a Hebrew phrase meaning “Kindness of God.” It was chosen by his father, a Methodist minister, who with his wife served as a missionary in Burma at the time his son was born. Haniel’s own son, Anton or “Tony” Long, lives now at Naples, New York, near Lake Canandaigua where the family owned a farm. He has been instrumental in keeping Long’s books in print, either by publication or facsimile microfilms. May Sarton, the New Hampshire novelist, wrote the Preface for My Seasons. She speaks for all who admire the verses of Long when she calls them poetry of discovery, a discovery of democracy in spirit and a communion between friends. T. M. PEARCE, University of New Mexico Wyoming: A Bicentennial History. By T. A. Larson. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977. 198 pages, illustrations, $8.95.) This new book by...