Words Under the Words: Selected Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye, and: Never in a Hurry: Essays on People and Places by Naomi Shihab Nye (review)

Reviews P o e t r y o f t h e A m e r i c a n W e s t Words Under the Words: Selected Poems. By Naomi Shihab Nye. (Portland, Oregon: Far Comer Books, 1995. 176 pages, $22.95/$13.95.) Never in a Hurry: Essays on People and Places. By Naomi Shihab Nye. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. 253 pages, $16.95.) Naomi Shihab Nye’s selected poems, Words Under the Words, represents her first three books: Different Ways to Pray, Hugging the Jukebox (a National Poetry Series selection for 1982), and Yellow Glove. Nye is one of the best poets of her generation, a fact underlined by her prominence in two recent PBS series on poetry: The Language of Life and The United States of Poetry. Readers can find a very full selection of her work in Words Under the Words. The most popular poetic mode of our time, the free verse lyric rooted in per­ sonal experience, has come in for criticism because it is so often practiced with­ out commitment. This poet is always vigilant: the rhythms are sharp, the eye is keen. She excels at the unexpected and brilliant detail that underwrites the poet­ ic vision. The image of a skillet appears in three of the poems, and that seems typical of Nye’s perceptions: a notoriously solid and practical object, brought into poetry. Her vision takes in the ordinary and extraordinary: there is a poem here about sending a beloved cat in the cargo hold of a plane, and others that focus with clarity and anguish on the intifada. Nye has a Palestinian-born father, and she explores her loyalties with great tact, revealing the rich humanity of peo­ ple who are often demonized. She has other loyalties: to the American side of her family, to the formative scenes of her childhood, and to the pressures and dramas of the people in her largely Mexican-American neighborhood of San Antonio, Texas. Like William Stafford, whose poems she admires, she is a writer with allegiances. Allegiances, not prejudices or animosities. For all her interest in other people, one theme that runs through the poems is the formation of the self and the subtleties of its development. Here she shares a great deal with William Stafford. For both poets, “world” is a favorite term, and they avoid narcissism by stressing the ways that the mind of the individual 266 Western American Literature makes its way in the world: being nurtured or injured, reaching out in sympathy or closing in a little to protect itself. Nye and Stafford both favor reaching out, but they dramatize a whole range of responses. They invite us to understand our own stories by telling theirs with memorable details. One of the best poems, “White Silk,” takes off from a Zen meditation—“Try to be a piece of white silk.” After a stunning series of dream images of silk, we find the poet in a general store, examining a bolt of white silk with smooth brown lines at the creases: we return to the world of iron skillets, but feel extended by the imaginative journey. The title of her collection, Words Under the Words, expresses a confidence in ultimate meaningfulness of our descriptions of reality. If we listen, we can hear the inner meaning. The essays in Never in a Hurry share much with the poetry. They have the openness to experience and the flexibility of development that we value in the essay form. The variety of the book is one of its pleasures: the essays range from long narratives to vignettes to prose poems. The places of her subtitle include Palestine, Oahu, Rajasthan, Maine, and Oregon. She is most compelling when she writes about her complex heritage. She grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, and makes those diverse places familiar to us. Perhaps the finest essays are the ones dealing with the Palestinian village where her father began his life: the figure of her grandmother, who died at 106 and lived her whole life in one place, is unforgettable. It is not easy to speak for Palestinian villagers in...