Requiem by Sam Hamill (review)

372 Western American Literature and in the end Chief Joseph and his fellow chiefs decided to escape to Canada. Joseph fought a rearguard action for three months against superior white forces, almost making it to Canada. But weather and provisions, not general­ ship, finally helped defeat him. It was then that Chief Joseph uttered the haunting words: “Hear me, my chiefs, I am tired. Heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.” The eloquent narrative is full of vivid detail: “Boys plunge into water, gay as The otter at gambol, with flat hands slap water Like beavertails slapping to warn, then dive ...” “Into a dark place my father has gone. You know how the hunter at dawn, waits, String notched, where the buck comes to drink. Waits, While first light brightens highest spruce bough, eyes slitted Like knife wounds, breath with no motion. My father Waits thus in his dark place.” “Death came with the whispering slynessof arrows.” “The unhived lead hums happily homeward.” “His sick, his old, his young are now driven Like wraiths in Joseph’siron dream.” The poetry, sometimes stark, sometimes lively, brings to an old American tragedy a depth and a force not found in any other historical account. Warren writes with the power of a Homer. The older Warren gets, the better he is as a poet — the true mark of a genius. FREDERICK MANFRED Luverne, Minnesota Requiem. By Sam Hamill. (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 1983. Unpaginated, no price listed.) The dominant voice of American poetry in the last twenty years has been an informal one, colloquial, often irregular in rhythm, conversational. What such poetry sacrifices in terms of formal power, it gains back in terms of intimacy: one speaker, one listener, the language a shared yet essentially private communication. If this has been the dominant voice, there has also been a secondary one, heard less often, perhaps for good reason attempted less often. This other voice is more public, conscious of being so, and, one might even say it has loftier ambitions. Sam Hamill’s Requiem is an example of this other, more public voice. In this too-short long poem, it is raised in celebration and in mourning. Written for Kenneth Rexroth, the American poet who died in 1982, Requiem’s subject is the complex knot of human existence announced in its Reviews 373 epigraph from Virgil: “Here too we find virtue somehow rewarded, / Tears in the nature of things, hearts touched by human transience.” It is the transi­ ence which occupies the center of this poem, a transience which death has forced the speaker not only to acknowledge, but at least momentarily defeat. Religious in the largest sense of the word, Requiem raises central questions: Why are we here? What is the meaning of our work? What is our individual value? Comprised of five sections and covering twenty-two pages, Requiem is not primarily narrative in character, nor is it a series of discrete lyrics. It is, rather, a meditation, its calm long sentences revealing a mind restless and caught in dialectical motion. Requiem begins with a quiet present scene, a view of an old fishing boat: “The old hull that slowly distintegrates among the stones of its / long last resting place. . . .” Under normal circumstances, this might be only picturesque, a scene for a calendar. But this poem does not arise out of normal circumstances. Its occasion is a death, and its speaker nearly over­ whelmed. For this speaker, casual detachment is impossible, and that hull must unavoidably provoke awareness of “a time it / creaked with delight and bore tuna in its hold and strong / young men worked its shifting decks.” From its opening coastal location, “the difficult reverie of the sea,” Requiem moves inland, to “Canyon de Chelly” and the desert West of the speaker’s childhood. In so doing, Requiem lays claim to the two dominant western landscapes, one wet, lush; one spare, dry. One is the landscape of the present; the other, the landscape of memory. And always with this movement, the search is for something to value, something persistent. It is such action of mind which animates...