Anvil of Roses by Thomas Hornsby Ferril (review)

Reviews 379 Anvil of Roses. By Thomas Hornsby Ferril. (Boise, ID: Ahsahta Press, 1983. 40 pages, $2.50.) Just as most of Tom Ferril’s poems are best appreciated when read against the backdrop of the front range of the Rocky Mountains, so are the poems in Anvil of Roses best read against the background of Ferril’s earlier poems. Personal experience and historic time are juxtaposed to the seemingly eternal geologic time in order to find an ever-present mythic eternity actualized in particular place. Local human experience in settling the West establishes sacred ground because, in Mircea Eliade’s words, “To settle a territory is . . . equivalent to consecrating it.” Happily, that consecration of the common­ place still exists in some of the twenty-two poems of the present volume. Several of the short poems have the simple power we have come to expect of Ferril. “Cecropia” establishes a quick analogy between “a boy named Wilbur” and a “midnight moth”; after a rather conventional opening, the poem ends with Tonight in some forsaken crucible Of memory Wilbur glows a moment and goes out. In “Night of Datura,” the narrator looks back on the love of one person and “that luminous night,” remembering in the final lines There may have been a thrust of swanlight On your hair. Cygnus was over usas I recall. As ever in Ferril’s poems, Cygnus is astral constellation but with a hint of an allusion to Zeus as swan. Ferril’s longer poem celebrating the nation’s bicentennial and Colorado’s centennial, “Stories of Three Summers,” makes good use of two of his char­ acteristic devices: recalling events from several time periods occurring at one location and identifying geographically scattered incidents occurring at one particular moment in history. He recalls different events of the three inescap­ able time periods (1776,1876,1976) happening in the same location: Colo­ rado. He also cites seemingly unrelated events taking place during one of those particular times. For instance, in the first part of the poem two friars suffer the hardships of travel, “goading their mules” over Uncompaghre Mesa while “Lord Cornwallis / Was prodding his red-coat musketeers” and “Foreshadow­ ings of Figaro / Were lilting in the singing heart / Of Mozart.” Only the mind, in this case the mind of the artist Ferril, identifies archetypal patterns, thus reaching beyond the temporal and spatial limitations to a spiritual (and aesthetic) unity of which the individual participants are unaware. The same device is used more successfully in perhaps the best poem of the volume, “Metamorphosis: 1806.” Unaware of each other, Pike, Beethoven, Napoleon, and Utamaro share a moment in 1806 when a prong­ horn antelope leaps over a clump of greasewood near what will be Pike’s Peak. 380 Western American Literature Along with the depersonalization coming from the modern over-use of Pike’s name is a failure to participate in the localized beauty of the region as symbol­ ized by the antelope. The incident is repeated in the same place in modern times as a mother and child ride a bus toward Colorado Springs. Upon arrival at the bus terminal (on Pike’s Peak Avenue), the mother says I must have dozed off back out where The driver said we saw a beautiful antelope jumping over a bush. To the child’s question “Mama, did we see the antelope?” the mother echoes the sad failure to personally experience events: We must have, dear, The driver said we did. Above all else, Ferril participates in the world around him and records the duality of finitude and infinitude inherent in each act, facing directly the granite world but finding more than rock. JAMES R. SAUCERMAN Northwest Missouri State University Theodore Roethke: The Journey from I to Otherwise. By Neal Bowers. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982. 228 pages, no price stated.) The question of mysticism in Theodore Roethke’s poetry haunts the Roethke criticism like a bad dream or an interminable visit by a sickly maiden aunt. The problem is that the term is loaded: it insists on its own indefinability. Anyone who has looked into the matter at all knows that what sits at the heart of the “mystical...