Little-Dog-Of-Iron by Philip St. Clair, and: Star Quilt by Roberta Hill Whiteman (review)

176 Western American Literature Little-Dog-Of-Iron. By Philip St. Clair. (Boise: Ahsahta Press, 1985. 43 pages, $3.00.) Star Quilt. ByRoberta Hill Whiteman. (Minneapolis: Holy Cow! Press, 1984. 77pages, $6.95.) In the Introduction to Philip St. Clair’spoems, Howard McCord suggests an appropriate subtitle: “The True History of Coyote in Our Time.” Through the persona of Coyote, who embraces comedy and tragedy, lyric and narrative, St. Clair discusses not only suburbs and cafes, hitchhiking and automobiles, law school and lechery, but also philosophy, religion, and history. Having been around a few centuries, trickster Coyote crosses paths with the Sioux, the Nez Perce, the Shawnee and the Wyandot. Coyote comments on the invading whites in two long, historically-based narratives, both titled “Coyote Addresses His Brothers, The Wolves and the Foxes.” The one poem, from a 1780 account, concludes with children re-enacting a chase for killer Samuel Brady; however, “no Red child may run with them.” In the other, when the Sioux’sGhost Dance fails to bring protec­ tion against the white army at Wounded Knee, “Wovoka, the good prophet” cries that “The only way for us to walk—[is]/The white man’s road.” St. Clair, who is one-sixteenth Native American, speaks as Coyote/Poet in his Villanelle: “I want our tracks to touch Grandmother’s heart.” With these poems he should not fall short. The book’s dramatic progression moves well from first poem to last. The first, “Coyote Paranoia,” finds him confused by suburbia where he ate garbage and cats because “Deer were silver laughing women.” After being chased into the woods where trees scraped his furry coat, Coyote says, “white men shot up my howls.” He finally made it, Coyote says, “to the plains of Ioway,” but with “no hair ... I had no hair at all.” In the final poem, hiding in an abandoned house, Coyote says, “I wait for the voice to tell me / Which way to run.” Toward pen and paper? Let us hope. Last seen, Coyote was running between past and present with much on his mind. At some point Coyote, “old as breath,” visits Roberta Hill Whiteman. Eye to eye with him in her poem “Recognition,” she writes, “he recognized and held my gaze ... it made my blood desperate / for the space he lived in.” A Native American, an Oneida, she speaks for all of America’s first peoples in the title poem when she addresses the Star Quilt: We know of land that looks lonely, but isn’t, of beef with hides ofvelveteen, of sorrow, an eddy in blood. She asks to be anointed “so we may embrace, two bitter roots / pushing back the dust.” In the Introduction, Carolyn Forche acknowledges “the spiritual guid­ ance” for everyone in these poems. The titles of the four sections mark White­ man’s progression, an initiation and realization achieved, as we all know, in stages. She moves from laments for her people and from love poems in Part I, Reviews 177 “Sometimes in Other Autumns” to Part II, “. . .Fighting Back the Cold with Tongues,” a quote from Richard Hugo; then on to Part III, “Love, The Final Healer,” and finally to Part IV, “Music for Two Guitars,” where her poems coalesce in songs of celebration, courage and resolve. In these poems of relationships—earth and past, lovers and families—she would reject “the dishes growing in the sink,” instead going out to the land and the people, if only the people and the land were truly hers: “If only we could lull or change / . . . this midnight swollen four hundred years”; however, “Indians know how to wait,” as in the lines “until the heart reveals / at last the grace we lost.” She learns “lessons of endurance.” Some of these poems ask much of the reader. Corners are turned sharply; long leaps, attempted. Connections emerge for those who take the time. And I took it, gratefully. NANCY McCLEERY Anchorage, Alaska Wild Onions. By Robert L. Jones. (Port Townsend: Graywolf Press, 1984. 54 pages, $8.00 paper.) Idaho Aerogram. By Linda McAndrew. (Boise, Idaho: cold-drill books, 1985. Unpaginated, $3.00 paper.) Robert Jones’s Wild Onions was one of five winners of...