The Beauty of the Weapons by Robert Bringhurst (review)

Reviews 187 ally happened, for he heard about it at a court trial involving Indians which he had attended as a young man. The writing of this story is superb. In perhaps no other book is there as vivid and complete a commentary on Plains Indian camp life and activity. A reader who has no idea whatever of a buffalo hunt, a war party, the interior of a tipi, a victory dance, of the deep religious convictions, or of the intensity of Indian emotions, cannot be but deeply impressed and appreciative of these aspects of Plains culture and must be moved by the clear and concise writing of this master of descriptive English. The beautiful introduction to this new printing, by Father Powell, is a further asset to the book, the glossary and notes should be helpful to those unacquainted with Indian ways, and the illustrations by Frederick Weygold are by one of the few artists who knew intimately the details of Indian dress and accoutrements and was able to portray them accurately. They are a real boon to the student who would like to know what things really looked like in those early days. Few books, even in this day of excellent color reproduction, are as convincingly and charmingly illustrated. REGINALD and GLADYS LAUBIN Moose, Wyoming The Beauty of the Weapons. By Robert Bringhurst. (Toronto, Ontario: McClelland and Stewart, 1982. 160 pages, $12.95.) Thirty-five isstill the age of innocence for a poet, a very tender age indeed for one to contemplate a Selected Poems. Yet Robert Bringhurst’s The Beauty of the Weapons carries the subtitle “Selected Poems 1972-82.” Bringhurst is rapidly becoming well known in southwestern Canada, and for the right reasons — his poems are clearly made things, modulations for the human voice that are chiseled and crafted and polished. His discipline is not flashy, but is clearly a part of each performance of the voice. Sometimes, however, it is exactly that (the discipline) which gives his poems a hard edge. He opens his new book with the following: These Poems, She Said These poems, these poems, these poems, she said, are poems with no love in them. These are the poemsof a man whowould leave hiswife and child because they made noise in his study. These are the poems of a man who would murder hismother to claim the inheritance. These are the poems of a man 188 Western American Literature like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not comprehend but which nevertheless offended me. These are the poems of a man who would rather sleep with himself than with women, she said. These are the poems ofa man with eyes like a drawknife, with hands like a pickpocket’s hands, woven of water and logic and hunger, with no strand oflove in them. These poems are asheartless asbirdsong, asunmeant aselm leaves, which if they love love only the wide blue skyand the air and the idea of elm leaves. Self-love isan ending, she said, and not a beginning. Love means love of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing. These poems, she said.... You are, he said, beautiful. That isnot love, shesaid rightly. Opening hisbookwith such a poem as an introduction isan act of extreme bravery, for it invites the reader to look at each poem in the light offered by the “she” of “These Poems.” And yet the first section of poems is introduced with the following quotation from Tso Ch’iu Ming: “When spiritual beings have a place to return to, they need not become malicious. I have allowed them a place to return to.” Bringhurst possesses an enormous appetite for the history of ideas. That alone would make him valuable. But his extraordinary ear and exceptional attention to craft bring to his poems a sense of living speech, of musically alive speech, that is rare. In a section of poems called “The Old in Their Know­ ing,” he combines translation with imaginative writing as well as anyone since Rexroth and Duncan, seekingout the power to unite things as the pre-Socratics might have done. In what may be the finest poem in this exceptional book...