Poetry of the American West

Essay Review P o e t r y o f t h e A m e r i c a n W e s t Even in Quiet Places. By William Stafford. (Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence Press, 1996. 120 pages, $20.00/$11.00.) Some readers might criticize Stafford’s later work for its predictable rhetorical structures, its sameness of tone and content, even the casual, sim­ ple language of the poems. But would anyone criticize Basho for writing haiku or Rumi for writing quatrains? These are the poets Stafford’s late work most resembles, poets devoted to celebrating the spiritual dimensions of ordinary objects and events. Stafford’s last poems place him in the wisdomteacher tradition, and make these poems all the more a treasure for us, given the paucity of such work by American writers. Stafford, more than any other, looks to the earth beneath his feet, the American West, and finds it a rich, sufficient, and sacred source for his intellectual, moral, and spiritual life. A Quiet Place, in the sense William Stafford intends, is any place out­ side, where the distractions of Self are less likely to interrupt “the story/ that means what everything is about” (“You Reading This: Stop”). In each of the sections of this collection, Stafford silences the noisy ego and witnesses the sacredness of the western landscape the poems inhabit: The great story weaves closer and closer, millions of touches, wide spaces lying out in the open, huddles of brush and grass, all the little lives. (“Over in Montana”) Those intimate, modest “touches” that narrate the world echo one of Stafford’s finest poems from The Rescued Year (1966), “Our City Is Guarded by Automatic Rockets”: “Bough touching bough, touching . . . till the shore.” In both poems, his imagery suggests a kind of Indra’s Net in which all presences are alive, interconnected, and aware. It is, in fact, this unabashed animism that informs Stafford’s moral and ecological vision. Though a similar thread of intelligence runs from “Our City Is Guarded by Automatic Rockets” to the later work, the earlier poem is far more con­ flicted, difficult, and ambiguous than anything that appears in Even in Quiet Places. In the earlier poem, the poet describes a vulnerable world 256 Western American Literature that won’t be wise and let alone, but instead is found outside by little channels, linked by chance, not stem; and then when once we’re sure we hear a guide it fades away towards the opposite end of the road from home—the world goes wrong in order to have revenge. Our lives are an amnesty given us. There is nothing ambiguous, however, about how the poet, a pacifist, ends this poem. He compares the presence of a ballisticmissile silo to ahunter who has “cornered” a wild cat saved by its claws, now ready to spend all there is left of the wilderness, embracing its blood. And that is the way I will spit life, at the end of any trail where I smell any hunter, because I think our story should not end— or go on in the dark with nobody listening. “Our City Is Guarded by Automatic Rockets,” is an astonishing poem. It is a painful, violent poem written by a poet clearly much younger than the one who wrote Even in Quiet Places. Though Stafford’s tone has changed over time, his themes are more or less consistent: the futility of what we conventionally think of as “Power,” the symbiosis of lives, the integrated story these lives are telling, and an insistence on how wilderness can become a spiritual guide. In this new col­ lection from Confluence Press, which reprints three elegant chapbooks first published by Donnell Hunter’s Honeybrook Press, and an expanded version of Confluence’s own chapbook, The Methow River Poems, Stafford has fin­ ished his labor and bequeathed his heirs (his readers) a spacious, spiritual household. Though the Wolf of Desire that threatens the world stalks at the margins of virtually every page, what Stafford has made here is built on a foundation of respect and praise for all that is modest, non-utilitarian, quiet, and probably unnoticed by those unable or...