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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 standing slightly stooped, pool cue in hand, con­ templating the eight-ball that Coyote is about to drop in the side pocket, and brooding over another world where there are powers—and pallet—“we don’t know yet.” STEVEN PUGMIRE Seattle, Washington Black Mesa Poems. By Jimmy Santiago Baca. (New York: New Directions, 1989. 126 pages, $8.95.) Black Mesa Poems is an impressive achievement, at once universal and thoroughly regional, even private. To read Jimmy Santiago Baca’spoetry is to tramp across the uneven terrain of human experience, sometimes lulled by the everydayness of work or relationships, and then dazzled by a flood of emotion or vibrant observation. Baca has a compelling fondness for contrasts. The moods and imagery of entire poems resonate against each other, like a medley of voices echoing in a canyon. One of my favorite pieces in this book isthe brief, melancholy sketch called “Hitchhiker.” Other poems, however, consider life with a mixture of humor and tenderness. “Since You’ve Come,” which was selected for the Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses 1989, opens with the exaggerated complaint of an unappreciated parent. But the final couplet, sixteen lines later, expresses the inevitable truth: “We have never loved anyone more than you / my child.” Poems about friends and family abound in this collection. But the presence of the landscape of Northern New Mexico is equally strong. Details of the natural world are, for the poet, either invigorating or stabilizing, sometimes Reviews 181 both. In the poem “Spring” he recalls watching new life “swell” above and beside a community irrigation ditch; in “Picking Piñons” he receives “murmur [s]” of a “stable world” from a tree. Many of the pieces in Black Mesa Poems suggest a fine ’ine between dream and reality; in “What’s Real and What’s Not,” Baca regains contact with the elemental landscape during a two-day camping trip with an “ex-vet Nam grunt”: “My singleness glimmers bright, / and my first time from home in months / makes the land glow, the sky bluer, / and the asphalt road / winding to the foothills ignites each nerve into a sacred torch.” “Black Mesa,” th; penultimate poem of the book, ties together many of the collection’s prominent motifs, tracing the congruence between the “north­ ern most U-tip / of Chihuahua desert” and the poet’s mind. Baca’s poetry itself, like the land which inspires it, is life-sustaining, life-vivifying—it makes life seem “real.” Readng Black Mesa Poems is an experience at once stirring and soothing. SCOTT SLOVIC Southwest Texas State University Buffalo Girls. By Larry McMurtry. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990. 350 pages, $19.95.) “If life just don’t suit you,” Calamity Jane advises in this remarkable new novel by Larry McMurtry, “Maybe it’s best just to cough and fade out.” In something more than s literal sense, that’s precisely the message of this book: that the Wild West died not with a bang but a whimper, and that the end of the trail was...

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