Handbook for Poets by M. K. O’Brien (review)

198 Western American Literature reflect . . . and ponder whether what the world wants from Wyoming is worth more than what Wyoming already offers the world.” ROBERT A. RORIPAUGH, University of Wyoming Handbook for Poets. By M. K. O’Brien. (Taos, New Mexico: Phainopepla Press, 1977. 78 pages, $5.00.) The first slender volume from the pen of a beginning poet can hardly be called a handbook, and the poem after which this book is named rightly makes the disclaimer that “this is not it.” The collection might better have been called a notebook. For nearly all the poems in it have not yet been written. They contain some occasional good lines: “. . . your skin, dancing around the room with you” (“Descriptions”), “I’m as old as I know” (“The Birdwoman”), . . you are crazy. Where are you leading me?” (“One Poet to Another”). A wholly unrealized vision of the holocaust (“Another Version”) ends with the poet as emissary to a new dawn of Creation, and a fine last line: “The world is at hand! Is this the sea? There’s land!” Yet most of the work here is not finished; it consists essentially of notes. The collection is termed “Prose Poems,” but the first statement of the first poem is inverted in order to achieve a rhyme: “No ‘how to’ does this book convey, for who could be so blank or numb as to anticipate a way?” The same clumsy usage appears in “Comparisons,” which begins: “The crow is blacker than the raven but not as strong. The ocean is bluer than the sky but not as long,” and ends: “Ink has led more than stone. Yet, at granite was the language thrown.” These lines are neither poetry nor prose, but doggerel. “A Prose Poem” suggests what the author is attempting to do in the book: “A prose poem says a little more and considers just long enough.” The syntax of the statement is as problematical as it is in the beginning of “Questions”: “Sparrow is a cheerful bird; no why concerns. He takes the days as they do.” Syntax is not, however, the greatest problem her defini­ tion presents to the author. For the most part, the poems simply do not say “a little more.” They say what prose says, using the generalizations of prose: in “Apologia”: “Poetry is different today. It’s more reflective. It’s a response to the inner turmoil of modem man.” This is not poetry, but social science. “Understanding” opens with: “Actually, I understand you perfectly, and you, me. We have plunged our reciprocal depths. Every nuance is known.” Such easy generalizations are matched by easy cliches, so that in “A Little Less Hand Action” we find “lush country meadows,” Reviews 199 “the restless sea,” “a sparkling stream”; in “Anything Is Possible” we read, “White, white, those sails unfurled by bold and dusky men!” The subject of nearly half these poems is the poet or the writing of poems. The author might well have been less self-consciously aware of the poet, have spent less time writing about the writing of poems, and more time doing the actual hard work of creating one, of concentrating, of finding the exact and specific image, of organizing the presentation which is the poem. ROBERT F. RICHARDS, Denver, Colorado The Coyote: Defiant Songdog of the West. By Francois Leydet. (San Fran­ cisco: Chronicle Books, 1977. 222 pages, $7.95.) Of all the native wild animals of the West, perhaps the most “western” are the plains buffalo and the coyote. The buffalo — big, powerful, foul tempered, stupid — survives in zoos, reserves, and private herds. The coyote — small, adaptable, humorous, smart — still prospers in the wild. Anyone in the West away from the cities can see coyotes and hear them sing the same songs heard by mountain men, early explorers, and settlers, giving us continuity with the old, unsettled land. The Coyote, unlike Leydet’s earlier books, Time and the River Flowing: Grand Canyon, and The Last Redwoods, is not a “picture” book. In the others, published by the Sierra Club, Leydet’s text is accompanied by numerous excellent photographs. The Coyote contains drawings by Lewis E. Jones, but they supplement and illustrate...