Driving to Vegas: New & Selected Poems. 1969–87 by Kirk Robertson (review)

Reviews 179 of Strand’s. Here, too, we see the mature poet pushing language to its limits, bending sentences and stanzas to his will. These are formidable poems, clear and precise, and they demand close attention. “Orpheus Alone,” perhaps the finest poem in the book and, to my mind, one of Strand’s finest poems to date, gives us Orpheus—poet, singer, lover— mourning his loss, “Taking off to wander the hills / Outside of town, where he stayed until he had shaken / The image of love and put in its place the world / As he wished it would be, urging its shape and measure / Into speech of such newness that the world was swayed . . .” and, “The voice of light / Had come forth from the body of fire, and each thing / Rose from its depths and shone as it never had. / And that was the second great poem, / Which no one recalls anymore. The third and greatest / Came into the world as the world, out of the unsayable / Invisible source of all longing to be / It came in a language / Untouched by pity, in lines, lavish and dark, / Where death is reborn and sent into the world as a gift, / So the future, with no voice of its own, nor hope / Of ever becoming more than it will be, might mourn.” The poet’s duty, then, is to write the world, to define it, inventing lan­ guage as he goes, making something “out of the unsayable,” whether or not it is forgotten. A hopeless proposition? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Poets since Cassandra have stood outside the pale, listening, singing, reaching out to an uncaring, unheeding audience. Mark Strand is not a poet for Everyone. His is not work that will be set to music or sung on the streets. The cursory reader will be bewildered, lost. But the reader who delves, who meets the poet halfway, will be rewarded by glimpses of a different world, that changeable one of dreams and the elusive beauty that haunts us all. JANE CANDIA COLEMAN Rodeo, New Mexico Driving to Vegas: New & Selected Poems. 1969-87. By Kirk Robertson. (Tucson: SUN/gemini Press, 1989. 276 pages, $25.00/$14.95.) Readers interested in more than the literary arts may be aware that Kirk Robertson, familiar to us as poet and editor/publisher of Duck Down Press, is a visual artist as well. Perusing the leaves of this compilation of his literary greatest hits, the reader is often aware, somewhere at the perceptive margins, of Robertson’s predilection for painting, which makes itself known in a softspoken way. It isn’t that the poems are particularly visual:most are too sparse to construct more than an abstract picture (Matters of Equal Height does this quite literally). What is most striking is Robertson’s pallet, which is very restricted, though not in any negative sense. The colors here are primary, the colors of the Great American Desert, a landscape that serves as matrix for the ranging poet. Unchanging blues, browns, whites, and grays dominate and set 180 Western American Literature the muted tone for this collection standing in stark relief against Robertson’s forays into the urban landscape whose colors are invariably described as neon: flickering, chameleon hues that reflect the ahistorical flux of the mainstream West. The fulcrum on which these opposites balance is the psychic territory of the Anglo who has immersed himself in the timeless world of Coyote, Wolf, and Crow, and then comes to in the morning to find he has not forgotten Las Vegas where his Mercedes-mounted, cocaine-consumed friends take him out to eat at McDonald’s. It may be too much to expect anyone to recover from such a shock, and it seems clear that Robertson does not. A retreat into the rooted locality of the Nevada desert suspended in the eternal verities of the desert wind offers some kind of relief, but it is a muted, monochrome relief diffused in melancholy and vulnerable to the encroaching neon of Vegas and California. Driving to Vegas could be characterized as a well-crafted road map for the culturally schizophrenic (which includes many of us) summed up by a photograph of Robertson...