To Touch the Water by Gretel Ehrlich (review)

Reviews 337 I am sure that Goodman intends the reader to feel enhanced respect for the American Indians after reading this book, and I expect that many readers will, and may even feel awe at the thought of people right here on this continent who have traditions going back to the beginning of human time. To my mind, however, this means of enhancing respect does a disservice both to humanity in general and to the Indians in particular, because it plays to longings and values that are particularly powerful in members of American industrial society. Humans should respect other humans not because of wonders they perform (or their ancestors performed) but because all of us share in life, and that is mysterious and wonderful enough. PAUL RIESMAN, Carleton College To Touch the Water. By Gretel Ehrlich. (Boise: Ahsahta Press. 1981. 46 pages, $2.50.) Ahsahta Press has done it again. As we have come to expect, they have produced another beautiful book, the latest in their series of contemporary poetry of the West. Gretel Ehrlich’s poems transcend their setting to make To Touch the Water a rare pleasure to read. According to Lucien Stryk’s helpful introduction, Gretel Ehrlich is a “filmmaker, essayist, editor, cow and sheepherder” (in Wyoming) as well as a tough-minded, sensitive and gifted poet. Her constant concern is with landscape and weather, both as they directly affect the people who live with them and also as metaphors for psychic states. As one would suspect from the title, water, snow and ice are recurring images. One of the best poems, “Probably She is a River” rings many changes on the theme of flowing water equated with the sense of being a woman in touch with the eternal ebb and flow, good and evil, pleasure and pain of life. The final line, “She isthe water that carries her,” reflects Ehrlich’s acceptance of the harsh realities of life as well as the essential oneness of earth and humanity, which is a frequent theme in her poetry. Snow and ice become symbols of the ambivalence of human love. In “Other Seasons,” this theme is particularly powerful. The poem begins, Long flanks of snow straddled and drifted my cabin all winter. Held me the way a man would if there had been one here. 338 Western American Literature The snow is warmth and protection, yet in the final lines, This morning the last glass sill of ice windowing the river held what I am when I’m alone but feel someone else moving in me. the ice reflects the essential aloneness of even a woman in love. Not all the poems are cold and bleak, by any means. “Born in the After­ noon” uses water imagery to celebrate the wonder and oneness of new life: Child, Child, still unnamed, unsexed, let go of your sleek garden of water, lower yourself through the locks of your mother’s body, climb down this wet ladder of weather — rain to earth — and wake up on a pillow of sage where antelope, too, are born in the afternoon. A few poems are slightly marred (at least to this reader’s ear) by a failure of rhythm or arbitrary, distracting line breaks; some of the longer poems, especially “Camilla,” would benefit from stanza breaks to give readers a chance to catch their breath; but on the whole Ehrlich is in good control of her poetic craft. More important, she is in complete control of her subject matter, and her poems are a steady look at life through fearless, percep­ tive eyes. She has titled one of her best short poems, “If you Wanted to Write a Poem.” Think of yourself on a great desert — like the Sahara — with a good fast horse and very little water. You’ve been thirsty a long time. Each time you talk The thirst gets worse. You ride quickly from mirage to mirage and each one has real water. Following Marianne Moore’s definition of poetry, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” Ehrlich has created an interior landscape with real water flowing through it, refreshing, invigorating, life-giving. ALICE G. HART, Logan, Utah ...