Baptism of Desire by Louise Erdrich (review)

Reviews 363 which have a densityof purposewhich require interpretation. Much of Morris’s writing on photography is an attempt to explain this paradox. Privacy can be protected by careful manipulation of words, but cameras are less selective and often provide pictures which appear easy to understand. This may be why so many of Morris’s photos are images:wishing to protect privacy, he nonetheless intrudes upon it—but compensates by “removing” reality from it; ironically, this sometimes lends itself to “artistic” conclusions. Although one might expect more precise reproductions for a book at this price (and from Aperture), Time Pieces is handsomely designed and for the most part carefully prepared, with a valuable index. A few errors mar the text, the worst an inversion of captions for photo-texts from The Inhabitants and God’s Country and My People (Illus. 4 and 5). And the famous GANO photo­ graph, which Morris carefully describes taking in Kansas, is credited as having been taken in Kentucky. But the most interesting “error” is Morris’s own— in two contradictory versions of Max Perkins’s acceptance of The Inhabitants (cf. 134, 141)— left intact, perhaps, as exemplary support for Morris’s belief that Active purpose is often born of faulty memory. Aperture deserves praise for its foresight in preserving these pieces in one place. Time Pieces may prove to be essential in evaluating Wright Morris’s contributions to American art and culture. JOSEPH J. WYDEVEN Bellevue College Baptism of Desire. By Louise Erdrich. (New York: Harper & Row, 1989. 78 pages, $16.95.) Let me confess at the outset: as mesmerized as I am by Erdrich’s fiction, I am not nearly as enthralled by her poetry. She uses the same devices in her verse that work so well in her prose—namely, a strong narrative line and the first person voice—but the poems somehow lack power. Perhaps they are too short for Erdrich to develop the narrative movement that animates her prose, and they rely too much on outside information to make the poems work;at the same time, they lack the compression of language that would make the verse more dynamic. Erdrich is an extremely gifted writer; but to be a better poet, she needs to distill her language, relying, paradoxically, less on imagery (espe­ cially the “‘of’machine,” as a teacher of mine once called it—“note of need” “showers of the damned,” “cave of stones”)—and work in forms different from those of her prose, where she uses catalogues and other parallel structures to great effect. That said, let me discuss the poems in Baptism of Desire. There are five parts or sequences in which Erdrich presents her major theme of the suffering necessary for spiritual rebirth. Part One speaks in the voices of saints and sinners; Part Two, in the voices of uneducated rural farmers. Parts Three and 364 Western American Literature Five describe the experience of childbirth; and Part Four, a prose section, tells the story of Potchikoo, a Chippewa trickster who overcomes death. All of the figures burn with desire. Indeed, according to Roman Catholic tradition, “baptism by fire” is the term for the leap of faith necessary to experience spiritual renewal. The figures in the poems seem to me, however, not to escape the demands of the flesh; in “The Savior,” for instance, Christ speaks against God’s purpose for him: “Ash to ash, you say, but I know different. / I will not stop burning.” If there is spiritual renewal, it is through our own human efforts, it seems, not through any divine grace. But we’re too often caught in our own pain to transcend it. As Erdrich says in a poem with the hopeful title of “Translucence ” : It was like this when I had the baby. Looking at you in extremity, so trapped in flesh, the body’s gates slammed closed between us. Perhaps there is no transcendence possible, these poems seem to me to suggest; there is at best acceptance of the “ordinary,” the daylight, when “sunlight fans across the ceiling.” In these poems, Louise Erdrich dares the profound, dares to speak of God, dares to describe the pain of childbirth and the anger...