Living off the Country: Essays on Poetry and Place by John Haines (review)

168 Western American Literature its overage heroes involved in gunplay, chases, saucy amorous dalliance and sentimental partings, The Old Colts has the earmarks not so much of a novel as of a film scenario for the likes of Robert Mitchum, who began his career as a gunslinger in old Hopalong Cassidy movies, and Burt Lancaster, who in fact played Wyatt Earp in the 1957 Gunfight at the O. K. Corral. KENNETH W. SCOTT Long Island University Matty’s Heart. By C. J. Hribal. (St. Paul: New Rivers Press, 1985. 101 pages, $6.00.) This volume of short stories is published as part of the Minnesota Voices Project. The casual reader who did not know that the author was a young man might be justifiably confused by the point-of-view ventriloquism repre­ sented by the half-dozen slices of middle-American life: an older woman, the Matty of the title story and of the concluding story “Kitchens,” tells her own account of being held hostage for a time in a local restaurant;Luther, a farmer of similar age whose sons have turned out badly and whose wife is dead, tells his own story, before being portrayed again in “Kitchens” as Matty’s lover; an adolescent girl, a diver, tells her story of initiation in “Stephers” ; a young woman leaves her hippie lover freezing and naked beside a spring lake in “Lake Poygan and the Politics of Departure,” in some ways the most accom­ plished of these stories, though not the most ambitious. The voices are impres­ sively varied and convincing, the language is assured, and the author’s tone mature and sympathetic. The pyrotechnics of point of view tend to call atten­ tion to themselves, and the point of some of the stories, particularly several very short sketches, seems obscure. It seems likely that these problems will disappear in the novel that the author is now writing about the title character, who is a fine and vigorous creation. ANTHONY ARTHUR California State University, Northridge Living off the Country: Essays on Poetry and Place. By John Haines. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981. 188 pages, $7.95 paper.) The decline of contemporary poetry results from a failure on the part of the writer to look outward, according to poet and critic John Haines in his collection of essays, Living off the Country: Essays on Poetry and Place. From the out-looking work of major writers such as Stevens, Frost and Williams, American poetry has declined past the self-centered introversions of Plath, Reviews 169 Sexton and Berryman to minor scribblers content with glib witticisms and hasty images. No complaint has arisen, either, from literary critics who inhabit the same writer’s workshops; they tend to flatter their friends. Poets should look to the land, to history and to the work of previous masters. Bringing these influences into poetry will encourage more meaning and more truth. Haines urges writers to get close to “the hard irreducible world of natural things” he experienced in twenty-two years of homesteading in central Alaska. There, he realized the inescapable importance of seasons, cycles, food and light. Poets should aim higher and shoot harder. “What we want in a poem is not some half-baked comment that any momentarily inspired ass might make, but a piece of work—let’s call it art—which embodies in a memorable way, through its sound, the images it represents, its rhythmical solidity and intensity, a part of our lives, recognizable and hidden.” As Haines suggests, poetry and place must be joined, but not superficially. What we need is more than the typically jejune musings of a grad student rusticating in a farmhouse all too close to Iowa City or Missoula. DAVE ENGEL Rudolph, Wisconsin Fatal Pleasure. By Sam Hamill. (Portland, Oregon: Breitenbush Publica­ tions, 1984. 75 pages, $14.95 cloth, $8.95 paper.) Stone Roses: Poems from Transylvania. By Keith Wilson. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1983. 94 pages, $12.95.) These are two very different, indeed almostopposite, collections of poetry. And yet they share a thematic matter. For both of them are attempts at recovering and understanding the past—although in one it is the personal past...