Flying over Sonny Liston by Gary Short (review)

Reviews 283 times, particularly the Depression. She creates small communities of individuals and exposes their feelings in a way that is always poignant and that points to an unsophisticated and genuine approach to life. These poems ultimately form a mosaic of events that shape the lives of the working class. These events reflect the sorrow, tragedy, and humor of life, and thus they give The Last Dust Storm the feelings of universality and naked truth. MARIE-MADELEINE SCHEIN West TexasA& M University Flying over Sonny Liston. By Gary Short. (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1996. 67 pages, $10.00.) Flying over Sonny Liston is Gary Short’s second full-length collection of poetry and winner of the 1996 Western States Book Award. We find here a work of great texture and feeling, a poetry that explores loss, landscape, and history with an unceasing clarity and a tenderness that never descends into sentimental­ ity. Short’s first book, Theory of Twilight, was a testament to suffering and per­ sonal history. Flying over Sonny Liston continues along this vein with many detailed explorations of loss. In “Elegy for My Mother,” Short combines lyrical description: “The moon’s/ thin yellow/ like a petal/ or a butterfly wing pinned/ against black velvet” with haunting wisdom: “the dead are not/ the sound of wind ... they are the sound of smoke.” In these two books, Short has revitalized the art of elegy, or as he says in “Wovoka,” “I have come to haunt the dead.” Short’s western world is mythic and bleak: we find wild horses, snow plows, brothels, and “the complete black of a Nevada night.” We learn “from the sparrows/ that sip . . . from pocket mirrors of water/ in the hoofprints of cattle.” Even more than the Nevada landscape, he eloquently depicts relationships with family, lovers, and neighbors. In “White” the speaker’s mother reveals her can­ cer to “No one, neither doctor/ nor husband, had touched this./ She had been alone/ with her body for a long time.” Short’s poetry, in many ways, is a poetry of loneliness and solitude, silence and untold heroism. In Flying over Sonny Liston, we hear the tough, small-town cadences of Richard Hugo, the plainspoken humor of William Stafford. Take, for example, the title poem, which recalls the life and death of the boxer Sonny Liston. Short introduces him “on all fours,/ trying to rise,/ a flame of pain/ in the center of his head” and goes on to recount Liston’s “bad press” and lonely death. Before long, 284 Western American Literature Short has extracted the universal from Liston’s story: “A boxer knows momen­ tum/ can suddenly shift. One blow/ changes everything ... The fight for survival is the fight.” CHRISTOPHER SINDT University of California, Davis Inheritance of Light. Edited by Ray Gonzalez. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1996. 240 pages, $24.95.) It’s as if the seventy-seven contemporary southwestern poets represented in Inheritance of Light begin from Miles Wilson’s premise—“First we establish that life is unfair”—and then move on to see what they can do about it. Some choose to try to start over in their individual lives (“let us consider seeing the nebula as they did/ on that first night of the world,” Patty Turner). Some choose to accept heroically the world’s blows (“a difficult/ and elegant/ glyph—/ accep­ tance,” Susan Bright). Some curse the easy targets or symbols of corruption or inanity, such as Shriners’ conventions, corporate greed, and overweight ambas­ sadors. The overwhelming sense one gets from the volume is that the world is too much with us, and we need to recall and record what will suffice before we are overwhelmed by “that something bigger/ something more terrible . . . just below the surface” (Milt McLeod). To counterbalance the terror and the bloodsoaked losses, to “soothe [their] dusty minds” (William Barney), and to prove to themselves that they at least have “governance/ of this given ground” (Sandra Lynn) of their individual lives, the poets record family tales and rituals, child­ hood memories, friends’ stories, daughters’ lives, their own defining rebellions, and moments of pure peace in the presence of the “genial moon” of the summer sky. The...