This Dancing Ground of Sky: The Selected Poetry of Peggy Pond Church ed. by Renée Gregorio (review)

Reviews This Dancing Ground of Sky: The Selected Poetry ofPeggy Pond Church. Edited by Renée Gregorio. Preface by Kathleen Church. Introduction by Shelley Armitage. (Santa Fe: Red Crane Books, 1993. 214 pages, $12.95.) In “Western Poetry, 1850-1950,”Tom Trusky calls Peggy Pond Church “a writer of great range and profundity” (A Literary History of the American West). Shelley Armitage echoes Trusky’s assessment in her introduction to this new selection of Church’spoetry. ThisDancing Ground ofSky also includes a preface byKathleen Church (the poet’sliterary executrix) and aforeword bythe editor, Renée Gregorio, who has organized her selections “into three sections that are divided thematically.”Part One, “Love’sGenius,”includes poems that dealwith personal relationships; Part Two, “The Rose, Unfurling,” “features poems that are more social in nature”; and Part Three, “This Dancing Ground of Sky,” focuses on the natural world and the poet’s relationship to it. In all, one hundred poems are included, thirty-eight of them previously unpublished and here interspersed among the other poems. Some of those previously unpub­ lished poems (“SillySong for My Eightieth Birthday”and “Words for a Spring Operetta in Walgreen’s Payless Drugstore,”for example) reveal Church’s fine sense of humor (which was not readily apparent in some of her earlier vol­ umes). Her work’s impressive range can be explained, in part, by the circum­ stances ofher life, for asArmitage tellsus, “Hers isa storyasrich asthe historyof New Mexico itself. . . . ” While growing up during summers on the Pajarito Plateau, she hiked and rode over mountains and through canyons, observing flora and fauna and marveling at the mysteries of Anasazi ruins. Her father founded a school on the plateau; her husband taught atthe school; and the U.S. government appropriated it so that the site could be used for the building of Los Alamos, where the first atomic bomb was developed during World War II. Church brought to such subject matter her study of Jungian psychology, Quaker theology, ancient Greek drama, and the poetry of Blake, Yeats, Eliot, Rilke, Neruda, Thoreau, and Wordsworth. This Dancing Ground ofSky makes available the art distilled from Church’s richly varied life and from her penetrating thought and feeling. It deserves a 356 Western American Literature wide audience, for as Kathleen Church rightly asserts, “None who read these poems will be unaffected; some will clutch the reader’s heart as they do mine.” What I hear in poem after poem is what Church said when asked about her poet’scredo; “It’sthe land thatwants to be said.”Isthat notalso the credo (or at least a major part of it) of RobinsonJeffers, Thomas Hornsby Ferril, and Gary Snyder, those other great poets ofthe American West? I hope that every library will soon have a copy ofthis book so that as many readers as possible can enjoy it and can come to understand why, at the end of“I Have Looked at the Earth,” Church can say: Oh never fear death for me for I have looked at the earth and loved it. I have been part ofearth’sbeauty in moments beyond the edge ofliving. JAMES H. MAGUIRE BoiseState University Mark Twain and theArt oftheTall Tale. ByHenry B.Wonham. (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1993. 207 pages, $32.00.) The tall tale is a collaboration which depends on a discourse community, a group of insiders. The knowledge shared by the community allows it to follow the game, with its quick swerves between truth and falsehood which outsiders, the gullible, cannot separate. That the deadpan tall tale is a distinctively American kind of humor, and that Samuel Clemens was a master ofit, is not news, nor that Clemens includes tall tales in many ofhis works. Here, then, isthe single but productive insight of Wonham’s study: the rhetorical situation of the tall tale is central to Clemens’s aesthetic, and it informs works even when tall tales are not reported to the reader. Consider, for example, the fellowship of pilots in Old Times on the Mississippi, with Horace Bixby and his cronies sharing tales based on their common fund ofriver lore—taleswhich we do not hear. In Wonham’sview, the pattern ofthe tall tale remains even in...