Cowboy Poetry From Utah: An Anthology ed. by Carol A. Edison (review)

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 book Hedin displays his willingness to accept the painful world, an acceptance which comes in a calm, pale dawn light—almost despair, never self-pity. County O makes Robert Hedin’s work available once again. It is a book that deserves to be read. JAMES GURLEY Missoula, Montana Cowboy Poetry From Utah: An Anthology. Compiled and edited by Carol A. Edison. (Salt Lake City: Utah Folklife Center, 1985. 127 pages, $9.95.) It’soften said that the sure sign of the death of a culture is the appearance of ethnographers and folklorists armed with cameras and tape recorders, snatching at choice morsels of story, song and color before the last echoes fade forever into the smoke of dying campfires. This book, coming hard on the heels of the First Annual Cowboy Poets Gathering in Elko, Nevada, isevidence of the continuing vitality of an endangered species, the American Cowboy. It’s also a chapter in that interesting and ongoing phenomenon in our society, what I call the “Cowboyization” of America. Cowboys are very much in vogue these days; everyone from truck drivers to yuppies is decked out in buckeroo chic, wearing colognes named “Stetson” or “Chaps” ;but it’s a long ways from the sagebrush. Reviews 173 Not that any of this is really new, of course. Hollywood, and before that, the magazines and dime novels, have long fostered and traded on the romanti­ cized image of the cowboy. Edison’s work cuts through all that dust in a refreshing balance between scholarly essays on the genesis and lifestyle of the cowboys and their poetry, and a commendable emphasis on material from the original source, the cowboys and ranch folk who write or recite it. Further­ more, the book is unique in its focus on a state where Mormon-influenced patterns of settlement, and the predominant Scandinavian ethnic origins of many stockmen, have produced a more “domesticated” style of ranch life. In adjacent states, big-outfit cowboys and buckeroos whose feet seldom touch the ground, and who would never sully their gloved hands on the bail of a milk bucket, will refer to “honyockers” and “cow farmers”; but Edison has elicited for us the homely, rugged charm of plain people who both calve and crop, and write about it, too. No less entertaining are the poets themselves. Some, like Melvin Whipple and F. Allan Brewer, show such command of imagery and sound that one is tempted to say they missed their callings. But maybe what they are, as cowboy poets, is better. This impression is strengthened by the fact that most of the poets come from families with writing traditions, and the arrangement of works in genealogical order lends a nice sense of unity to the book. One burr under the saddle is raised in Mike Korn’s essay “A Definition of Cowboy Poetry,” demonstrated to some extent by the weaker poetry in this section, which in some cases deserves...