A Place Made Fast by Mark Halperin, and The Leaf Path by Emily Warn, and Drinking and Driving by David Lee (review)

Reviews 255 A Place Made Fast. By Mark Halperin. (Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 1982. 67 pages, $6.00.) The Leaf Path. By Emily Warn. (Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 1982. 58 pages, $5.00.) Drinking and Driving. By David Lee. (Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Can­ yon Press, 1982. 53 pages, $5.00.) I don’t think one can say it too often: Copper Canyon Press puts out some of the handsomest paper-bound books produced. But the insides of those books? From a tiny press on the edge of the continent? Simple — the insides are worthy of the outsides. Of these three poets, Mark Halperin is no doubt the best known, but even he deserves to be much better known than he is. For Halperin is not only a technically accomplished poet but also a most moving one. The technique is shown, for instance, in the almost imperceptibly but nevertheless brilliant sound patterns of these poems — not sound patterns that leap to the ear but ones that make a fine and exquisite music: “I wish I’d made my son a human song / to hold like a hand with the odor / and light of his mother’s hair, / till he dozed. The dark wants us and must belong // where we live, it finds us so often. / I’m in the next room where / the fire roars. His bears, / beside him, already sleep.” The vowel music here, the alliterations of nasals and liquids, the unobtrusive rhymes like “song” and “belong,” the approximate rhymes of “where” and “bears,” are quietly lovely. More important, though, is Halperin’s gift for making narrative and character into feeling and meaning: some of these poems, e.g., “A Servant,” delicately suggest implications far beyond their surface “allegories.” And some with a “realist” base, such as “Voltairine de Cleyre at St. Johns” or “Franz Jagesttater’s Epistemology,” become significant meditations on human history. And those of the second section, poems on loss (by death, by time) (re) create beautifully our own frail humanity. Emily Warn is another kind of, but not lesser, poet. Hers is a far different sensibility; in a sense, she is more daring, more experimental, although one sometimes can feel that this is so because she isstill finding her own voice. Yet some of these “experiments,” e.g., the “characters” of Esther or Lady Murasaki , enable Warn to escape the narrowness of the self, to give herself range (and putting Lady Murasaki in Saskatchewan is a marvellously mad image). Indeed, Warn is wonderfully imagistic: “Two women in linen shirts, / reedy and full of birds, / pick shore weeds and gossip.” The more “personal” poems here, though, are the richest emotionally;they are also the more clear, eschew­ ing that surrealist idiom that both adds to and obscures some of the other poems: “Yesterday the meadow, the long unopened daisies / . . . / . . . were ghosts of themselves in thick fog / as I rattled past on the tractor . . . / . . . / I . . . / picture the half-moon of your arms as my hearth.” To use a cliche, here’sa poet we must watch. The promise isgreat. David Lee is even more another kind of poet. Copper Canyon has the 256 Western American Literature courage to go beyond, or beside, the standard. In Lee’swork, there’sno “poet” at all, just a voice. When I first started reading these poems (or one long poem in three sections), I thought, “Oh God, not another middle class poet trying to sound like a country man,” but Lee catches the voice quickly — and keeps it. He has listened to others speak. And, in making a sort of social comment, in creating the hard world of the bottom class, he does so by telling, retelling, some of the funniest and most terrible stories I’ve read in a long time. Here is, usually, an authentic American voice, talking, talking, talking, telling its folk­ tales, exaggerating, lying, and yet somehow giving us the truths about one of the underbellies of American life: “I knew this other guy who was loading up” a reluctant sow, “and he grabs her by the tail with / one hand and the ear with the other / / and then he grabs her again but...