Selected Poems, 1969–1981 by Richard Shelton (review)

248 Western American Literature Selected Poems, 1969-1981. By Richard Shelton. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982. 221 pages, $14.95 cloth, $6.95 paper.) In the new edition of Contemporary Poets, Richard Shelton comments simply that he hopes his “work reflects something of the Sonora Desert,” in which he has lived for over twenty years. Landscape determines, Lawrence tells us, and here I think is the key to Shelton’s work. The desert is a place where presence and the surreal conjoin in nature. Nowhere else, it seems to me, are we so insistently aware of the physical: the heat and cold beyond measure, the severe arroyos, the paleolithic rock formations;and yet the night’s utter blackness broken by summer lightning, the endless winds and dust stilled to sudden stark silence, Navaho and Apache dancers who are eagles in human disguise — all these transcend the phenomenal, convince us that we have truly entered, as Shelton writes, the haunted “land of gods in exile.” It is a place both fixed in time and always in flux. While Shelton is neither a pure imagist nor a pure surrealist, from his earliest collection (Journal of Return [Kayak, 1969]), his best poems have been those which are seeded in the particular only to blossom into the marvellous. I say his best poems because, it seems to me, Selected Poems, like the earlier six volumes and previously uncollected poems from which it draws, israther uneven. Shelton isa poet of conscience, compassion, and moral sense; this is both a great strength and, unfortunately, a weakness. Interestingly, two poems which hover around a similar subject rest in the middle of the volume, Janus-faced, as if to serve as object lessons of Shelton’s failure and his success. First, “Certain Choices,” My friend, who was a heroin addict, isdead and buried beneath trash and broken bottles in a prison field. He died, of course, because of the way he lived. It wasn’t a very good way, but it kept him alive. When itcouldn’t keep him alive any longer, it killed him. Thoroughly and with great suffering. After he had made certain choices, there were no others available. That’s the way it iswith certain choices, and we are faced with them soyoung. I have few friends, and none of them are replaceable. That’sthe way it is with friends. We make certain choices. I have no quarrel with Shelton’s attitude here, and in fact feel a bit like the proverbial dog in the manger in taking issue with the poem at all because it centers on such a signal tragedy. Yet although the poem relates an instance of personal grief, it is, finally, political. In his essay introducing Forty Poems Reviews 249 Touching on Recent American History, Robert Bly reminds us that political poetry which is in the main rhetorical is doomed to failure — “The political activists in the literary world are wrong — they try to force political poetry out of poets by pushing them more deeply into events.” For Bly this is error because “the poet’s main job is to penetrate the husk around the American psyche. . . . Once inside the psyche he can speak of inward things and political things with the same assurance,” an assurance that leaves behind rhetoric, cliche, and the copula. To a reader who has only the text in front of him, Shelton has sketched what is finally an idea for a poem; both his friend and his friend’s death (and then, by extension, our “certain choices”) remain generic, flat. Curiously, “Death Row” follow's immediately across the page, have you been to the land of carnivorousbirds where brown leaves hang on all winter rattling for release and the fencesare strands of blood strung between living scarecrows a flat land of small farms where those who cannot afford a river build their houses beside a dry ditch and live behind fever’sold walls while the curtains burn at everywindow and outside the dogsbark all night where each tree waits for its rope while the stars fall away toward morning and months come out ofthe future likebullets striking the last legof a one-legged journey the...