County O by Robert Hedin (review)

Reviews 171 Bishop’s wife (“. . . She has to give birth / To sons of Bishops, alas!” she says in a limerick). One may read about Foote’s life in her poems, and especially in her daughter’s six-page-long biographical essay entitled “Foote-notes” ; but rather than for its poetry, Selected Poems is memorable for the strong indi­ vidual whom it introduces to the reader. Linda Bierds’ poetry occupies the opposite extreme to Foote’s, in that her private life is never the subject of her poems. Bierds “tells the stories of trans­ formations,” says Pamela Stewart in her introduction to Flights of the HarvestMare \ and there are, indeed, transformations here: A snail, in the hand of blind Helen Keller, is transformed into a “Tongue,” the thing’s essence pre­ ceding language, that world-restricting form of cognition that spells the thing into definition: “. . . the tingling sn and ail.” “Tongue” isboth a lovely poem and an excellent example of Bierds’ central concern as a poet; and the image she creates of Keller holding both her hands out to the world isunspeak­ ably poignant. In one hand she holds the thing-tongue, and in the other “Someone” spells out letters that, while defining the world, restrict the indi­ vidual’s responses to it. Snail thereafter may be like a tongue but is not a tongue. Simile, then, becomes the inevitable device one resorts to when attempting to approach and, even, regain the sub-nominal essence of things. Bierds is an obviously gifted poet who, analogically speaking, holds both her “brailing” hands out to the world but frequently strains the device of simile to connect them. Beached whales become “like tarred pilings,” their teeth “clicking like wind-chimes.” The whales become objects—and, worse, man-made objects—when Bierds strains for comparisons. Likewise, in the volume’s title poem she exposes her most obvious weakness as a poet: She seems not to know when to stop talking, when to stop carting in similes, and let the power of silence work for her. She creates a moving description of a lamb’s birth, “to that first sunlight, the muzzle, two small hooves”—but here, where the small emergence should be allowed its own hushed silence for at least an instant, Bierds decides the lamb is—“like a diver.” Fortunately, Bierds’ remarkable poetic talents soften the clunk of her favorite device, and she deserves to be read. DAVID A. CARPENTER Loyola Marymount University County O. By Robert Hedin. (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1984. 55 pages, $7.00 paper.) While many contemporary poets employ a narrative, prosaic style, Robert Hedin infuses his poems with a refreshing lyric voice, raising his language above the commonplace. The land for him is a living, breathing entity, with a power to obliterate as well as nurture and shelter our past. Stemming from his travels in Alaska, Europe, Northern Africa and the midwestern U.S., his first 172 Western American Literature two books descended into the scars and blood of a land that isolated him while it spoke to him. In County O, readers will find some of those earlier poems intermingled with newer ones. The book is divided into three sections, or more exactly, three landscapes, each with a distinct character and voice. In section one, the cold Alaskan starkness threatens to wipe out everything. However, Hedin’s imagination searches through what has been lost to reach a fragile balance between what he sees on the surface and what survives underneath— I wonder if the snow country is green underneath . . . Or does it move down silently gyrating forever, Glistening with the bones of animals and trappers, Eggs that are cold and turning to stone. This concern for bones and stones (what the land lays claim to) continues in section two, as exemplified in “The Shrine of Tanit,” when Hedin calms his young son’sconfusion: I want to tell him that the earth here Is warmer than any house he has known, And that beneath us now are bones No bigger than his fingers, Row upon row of first-bom buried Under these burning slabs of stone, All ground down to the age of the earth. Throughout the...