Circle of Light by Charles Levendosky (review)

Reviews 281 In his informal, letter-style poem about my friend, Preston offers Curt some suggestions for conduct at future gatherings, where poets, singers, and story­ tellers do a great deal of reading, reciting, singing, and storytelling in a short period of time. First, Preston tells Curt to “shift from whiskey . . . to chamomile tea.. . . ” I called up my friend to see if he had taken the advice, and he said he did not know how to pronounce the stuff and wouldn’t drink it even if he could pronounce it. When he drinks tea with his chicken fried steaks, he prefers Lipton over ice, which is how tea is supposed to be consumed. Second, Preston writes, “stay in bed at least a few hours every night. . . .” Well, Curt does that, but I’ll bet he’s not sleeping while he’s there. Third, Preston recommends avoiding country and western music and listen­ ing to Mozart and Schubert. Say who? Did they used to front for Willie Nelson? Finally, in lines and stanzas Preston writes that he hopes Curt “dreamed a perfect cowboy Kubla Khan/ all the way home to New Mexico.” Mr. Preston needs to know that Curt won’t have anything to do with Mongols, especially those from some sorry little state in the backwoods of the Orient. Preston’s poems are very personal, with references and allusions about which only he and the friend from Elko would know. They are also very prose­ like. Finally, they are written more as revelations of the self than as communi­ cations to others. JIM HARRIS New Mexico Junior College Circle of Light. By Charles Levendosky. (Glendo, Wyoming: High Plains Press, 1995. 72 pages, $9.95.) Charles Levendosky is one of the truly enigmatic figures of western letters: teacher, mathematician, editor, nationally awarded columnist, and a prolific poet. Circle of Light is his tenth collection, and in it he fights to extract the pure grace of existence from a wide range of resources: love, friendship, the natural world, old age, and the oppressions of humans and state. While the poetry is sometimes too clever, too prescriptive, its optimism in the face of difficulty overcomes any deficiencies of tone or style. Circle ofLight is divided into three sections: “Of Light,” “Of Place,” and “Of Illusion and Reflection.” “Of Light” explores Levendosky’s tendency toward the ethereal; we find in this section the bulk of the book’s love poems and elegies. “Continental Divide” recalls some of Levendosky’s earlier work—specifically, the driving poems of his first book, Perimeters—but here he has forsaken the Kerouac tradition of freedom and hungry observation. Here, he drives toward 282 Western American Literature something, someone: “Table/ Rock, Red Desert, Creston Junction—but these/ tires can’t roll fast enough to close the gap.” “Of Place” offers the book’s most impressive descriptive passages, but it also presents the other of side of place: relocation camps, coal mines, bar-fly hunters who “bite down/ on sleeping pills and gun barrels,” and the description found in “Fragments of Americana,” of a “junkie whore/ with scabs on her knees/ who first came here/ from a high school/ beauty contest/ wanting to be a show girl.” After reading some of the book’s lighter love poems, I found these refreshingly gritty. “Of Illusion and Reflection” details the underside of contemporary life— incest, execution, aging, suicide— and offers a way out, an optimism sprung from a lifetime of experience: “The rain, late at night,/ reassures us in her hush­ ing way,/ tucks us in, and shoos away/ our daily cares.” Charles Levendosky’s poetry functions much in the same way this rain does: it takes our daily con­ cerns, acknowledges them, and comforts us with accounts of love, mystery, and light. He takes us, as he says earlier in the book, “together out of the sun’s/ and our own eclipses—/ into a gradually brightening sky.” CHRISTOPHER SINDT University of California, Davis The Last Dust Storm. By Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel. (Brooklyn, New York: Hanging Loose Press, 1995. 104 pages, $20.00/$ 12.00.) Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel’s collection of poems provides a series of obser­ vations about ordinary people whose small...