Collected Poems of Kay Boyle by Kay Boyle (review)

166 Western American Literature moments like now when there’s fire on the water, and the cormorants’ cries though loud cannot contain a sudden leap toward heaven. (“Fire on the Water”) Gerrye Payne’s The Year-God is a volume to read and reread. •llectedPoems ofKay Boyle. By Kay Boyle. (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1991. 172 pages, $10.00.) The poems of Kay Boyle now span more than half a century, two world wars, and innumerable movements for freedom, artistic as well as political. The time span in which the poems have been written is one of remarkable mobility, restlessness, curiosity and change, both creative and destructive in nature. Kay Boyle’s poetry reflects an intense commitment to the creative side, and it also reflects her citizenship in the larger world: Greece, Europe, England and Ireland, as well as transcontinental America from the East to the Midwest to the Far West. Boyle once said that she did not want to write “with a definite sense of procedure,”that shejust wanted her writing “to be.”Here are poems that reflect the freedom Boyle intuitively understood she must have in order for her imagination to have full sway. These poems are as varied as a field of spring wildflowers and as passionate as a summer storm. Some poems, though grounded in personal experience, rise up, twist and curl into a fire of larger meaning and associations. Such a poem is “A Complaint for Mary and Marcel,”which moves through three levels of writing to conclude in a concentrated Stein-like prose. Although many of these poems champion women, artists and minorities, they readily transcend “protest” labels. For example, “Angels for Djuna Barnes” echoes Rilke: “The throat to angels is the horn of love/Hallowed by singing, clasped by women’s hands/Sex unicorned, winged simply as the dove/W ho sunwards crosses heaven’s shifting sands.” Even the later poems of the 1970s reflect the same passionate devotion to freedom, the same caring for the outcast and the forgotten. A powerful work is “A Poem for the Teesto Dine of Arizona,” where the natives are being “relo­ cated”by force. “(‘Relocation’is the word, the death sentence given/To people with another look in their eyes,/To those with the beaks of eagles, who carry/ / THOMAS AUSTENFELD Drury College Reviews 167 Their history with them as they go. It is a word/For the uprooting of trees ... for the harnessing/O f deep rivers in a ravished land.)” With the welcomed publication of Collected Poems ofKay Boyle, the poetry of an important American writer will achieve a more deserved reading to match that which already exists for her short stories. ^HARLES DAUGHADAY Murray State University J^ger Women and Elk Men: The Lakota Narratives of Ella Deloria. By Julian Rice. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992. 211 pages, $22.50.) Julian Rice’s new book, Deer Women and Elk Men: The Lakota Narratives ofElla Deloria, makes a worthy addition to his continuing studies of the literature and language of Native Americans, of the Lakota, in particular. Functioning as a literary critic, linguist, and ethnographer, Professor Rice expands our under­ standing of Deloria’s methodology in recording and interpreting Lakota oral narrative, as well as illuminating the complexities of maintaining, translating and understanding an oral tradition by means of an often incompatible written tradition. He contends that, like Isaac Bashevis Singer, Deloria has taken on the responsibility of preserving her “oral heritage and [her] language.” In this collection of related essays, Rice focuses his discussions on the narratives Deloria gathered in Dakota Texts and on her ethnographic work in the still-unpublished Camp Circle Society. For the reader unfamiliar with Deloria’s narratives, the book offers a helpful appendix containing English translations of the thirteen narratives Rice examines in the greatest detail. He begins his study of these narratives with an extended sort of ethno-Freudian interpretation of their sexual themes. This approach serves to exemplify oral narrative’s role as guardian of cultural codes and displays the Lakota emphasis on “love for the whole nation of relatives,” in contrast to the Euro-American cult of the indi­ vidual. Subsequently...