Carpal Bones by Margaret Aho (review)

Reviews 375 His is aworld where “aspens turn their backsides”out ofembarrassment at being titillated by the wind. Quayle, whose namesake suggests the very life he touts, ponders questions of whether the Snake River “was really the Snake before it had the Name”as he effectively paints a land as moving aswater. His is a paradigm where a covenant with a dying Pinto is given more reverence than money to which (or perhaps whom) Quayle also assigns a near numinous quality. He writes that “A person has to respect/Money to have it. Have never come to give/Money the proper respect it deserves.” Quayle’s universe is one where humus interweaves with humility. As he is reading to his dogJake from Dante’sDivine Comedyhe observes that she likes the language but concedes that “Horse shit must all taste the/Same no matter how expensive the horse.” Indeed it isthe humor ofthe text that savesitfrom sounding like an anemic Emerson or a Lawrence trying to work out issues ofandrogyny. Quayle writes of picking up Ayn Rand’s Capitalism: The Unknown Idealfor a dime and spending too much, of a Caretaker who doesn’t care, or of skiers dressed in “full body condoms.”Indeed the selfparody that saturates the text saturates the landscape Quayle seems to sense as a Self. As he closes the text the narrator is shown humming the Hank Williams tune “there’ll be no teardrops tonight.” It is a bittersweet proclamation as paradoxical as the sense of community Quayle finds in nature. BILL FINLAW University ofNebraska Carpal Bones. By Margaret Aho. (Boise: Limberlost Press, 1993. 36 pages, $15.00.) Itisagenerous book,with its serene cover the colorof bleached skulls,with the title impressed in a gray square: CarpalBones, poems by MargaretAho. And the parchment texture ofthe endsheets, almost like skin dried in the sun. And the hand-sewn, cream-white text sheets, framing the crisp black typeface of the poems with their crimson titles. A labor of love, this elegant limited edition from Limberlost Press complements the austerity of the poems with the clean craftsmanship of the best small press in Idaho. It is an austere book, with these seventeen poems like thousand-year-old seeds from a queen’s tomb that become, suddenly, potent and powerful, un­ folding their amazing blooms. They come from a hidden place, from years in the poet’s notebook, prized away, carefully stored against family and friends. The publishing of Margaret Aho’s first book of poems is a literary event for Idaho and for the Northwest. Many of the poems were first published in respected magazines, including Cutbank, Northwest Review, Willow Springs, and 376 'WesternAmerican Literature Beloit PoetryJournal One was selected for the 1990 Northwest Poets & Artists Calendar. All this aside, however—the long-anticipated arrival of Carpal Bones marks the debut of a strong and mature poet, whose writing was a well-kept secret, and who only in the lastfewyears has come forth, boldly, to recite these scripts in a chanting voice, eyes closed, hermetic and sensual, intense, angelic. It is a secret book. Not the dead glyphs of scattered bones so much as the shadows dancing on the walls behind the eyes. The title poem, “Carpal Bones,” illustrated with a drawing by the poet’s son, brings us “What is unspoken, wordless . . . eight small bones absorb, radiate what can’t be said.”The carpal bones of the wrist “give off a clustered light like a second brain, like an ovum already fertile and eight celled.”They signify treasure and mysterywithin us, to be severed, stolen, “separated like dwarf-iris bulbs, shaken, thrown, consulted.” While the images ofmany poems come from the intimate silence ofgarden and kitchen, they open like doorways, pulling us into history and myth, into the collective unconscious ofancient realities. The sensuality ofcolor and smell, of the body in its sex, of changes we suffer and survive, emerging, uncurling— these mysteries reveal themselves to the intelligence that does notfear to look at them, and the heart that trembles in their presence. And to the poet who resonates and records, with meticulous care and religious abandon. It is, at last, a spiritual book. Powers are recognized and...