The Enchanted Room by Maurya Simon (review)

Reviews 371 The Nearness of You. By Carolyn Kizer. (Port Townsend, Washington: Cop­ per Canyon Press, 1986. 97 pages, $9.00.) Well, why can’t a poet stay on the charts with a reissue of greatest hits? And, hey, just who says you can’t remain a close personal friend of the Muse, and still keep an eye on your basic PR, networking and distribution channels? These impertinent questions spring to mind from the acknowledgement page of Carolyn Kizer’s new book where 9 of 38 poems have been booked before, including 4 from her Pulitzer winner Yin (1984). The title for her new collection is from a Hoagy Carmichael song, but although she is not drifting into any Hollywood or pop chart venues neither is she visiting any new neigh­ borhoods. The new poems continue Kizer’scool and knowing observations on personal experience which often serve as the prologue for wider themes. She remains a clinician of the emotions and the little fates of daily life, and of a feminist perspective perhaps more muted in this collection, which sees the trials of the sexes in the long reach of history. The book is arranged in four sections: Manhood, Passions, Father and Friends. Section three, one of the most riveting parts of the book, includes a prose sketch of Kizer’s father, a formidable gentleman, stern and wise. These prose pieces give the reader marvelous insights into Ms. Kizer’s family and her formative years. Should one feel uncomfortable with such biographical disclosures? Or chagrin that they seem to overshadow the poems? Perhaps, but for those who like their poetry in a warp and woof of known history and experience, Kizer’s familial histories are illuminating. DOLPH CORRADINO Annandale, Virginia The Enchanted Room. By Maurya Simon. (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1986. 101 pages, $9.00.) It seems characteristic of many young American poets, hungry to connect with everything, to rely heavily upon pathetic fallacies, personification, or anthropomorphism. Maurya Simon is no exception to this wrong-headedly anthropocentric approach to nature, as evidenced in most of the fifty-eight poems comprising The Enchanted Room, her first book. For example, in “Dividing Light,” clouds “prowl the heavens,” winter “closes its shutters,” and spring “nuzzles against” the poet’s hair; in “Red Tide,” stars are “pinned to the . . . sky” and “beat their wings furiously . . .” ; in “Hermosa Beach, Revisited,” ocean waves are “greedy” ; and in “Venice ,1959,” the sunlight has “full lips.” Such cartoon images might have been justified—as they are in, say, Robert Frost’s “Once by the Pacific”—were the speakers’paranoia essen­ tial to the conflicts in the poems; but Simon is the speaker in all these particu­ lar poems, and mental derangement is not the point of focus. 372 Western American Literature More troubling than the fallaciously presumptuous way Simon deals with inanimate objects is how she deals with other humans in her poems. How can an American poet, visiting India, presume to tell her readers that East Indian women, while walking upon hot coals, weep “in joy” or “in grief”—or that the old East Indian men watching the fire-walk “remember dancing above / the white ashes . . .” (“Firewalking”) ? Of course presumption is essential to empathy; yet Simon’s frequent presumptuousness overshadows her empathy throughout this collection. She presumes to know that an East Indian man’s life will be predictable in the years following his son’s death (“The Bearer’s Son”), that institutionalized individuals “all long for a father or mother” (“Lost Souls in an Asylum”), that young men on the beach “wonder what genies they’ll unleash / when polished by love’s hand” (“On the Island of Krk, 1971”), that her recently married sister is “looking for something . . . she’ll never find . . .” (“The Wedding”), that East Indian girls’ “souls will cling / to their bones” when they fall asleep fearful of a Yeti (“Yeti”), that Sunday fishermen “think / as little about gravity / as they do about war and / the weightlessness of time” (“The Fishermen at Guasti Park”), and that a family killed in the firebombing of Dresden “learned . . . everything is possible . . .” (“Return to Dresden, 1945”). It might seem by a quick glance at Simon’s...