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B o o k R e v ie w s Some reviewers have claimed that Kantner attacks “consumerism,” and certainly Cutuk learns from his father a healthy distrust of conspicuous consumption and American materialism. But this novel is no Sierra Club tract. Cutuk loves his dog team, but he also appreciates the advantages of a snowmachine , the necessity of subsistence hunting, and the joys of bush flying. In fact, the emotional high point of the book comes after he hijacks a small plane to go see his boyhood love. Flying is one kind of initiation through which he must pass in order to connect with his paternal grandfather, and it is just as emotionally important to him as the journey he makes by dogsled to track down his Native mentor. The novel’s early scenes are the most powerful, describing Cutuk growing up in a sod cabin with his father and two siblings, living a subsistence life in the harsh Arctic landscape, dealing with internalized antiwhite prejudice, and blaming himself for his mother’s leaving. The second and third parts of the book, although not quite as viscerally powerful, are still honest and difficult, refusing to give the reader any easy outs. This novel deserves to be read not only because it’s well written and because it fills an important regional niche, but also because it dramatically poses some tough, important questions about the meaning of life, without resorting to melodramatic answers. The Empty Boat: Poems. By Michael Sowder. Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press, 2004. 77 pages, $24.95/$14.95. Reviewed by Theodore Haddin University of Alabama at Birmingham If Michael Sowder’s first work, A Calendar of Crows (2001), revealed his extraordinary powers as a mythmaker, The Empty Boat appears like a dream of words at last in our hands. With his keen sense for what is natural and transcendental , he has Whitman in his heart and gains every day in his own voice. There are poems here about death, dreams, love, humor, crows, fishing, prayers as poems and prayers in poems, visions, and mysticism that will enlighten every reader of this book. Praise for The Empty Boat is but the beginning. It is as if something has been revealed and the poet has been discovering what it is in poem after poem. Almost the whole story could be told in the eight poems here about crows, bird and man wedded forever. Only someone who has transcended the world of material objects could have such joy in writing: I think of the sky in their bones— the way a crow never soars, but moves below, black, across the valley green, like the shadow of a cloud, a lost kite, a blind spot moving through the landscape. (16) 2 1 2 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S u m m e r 2 0 0 5 Encounters like quick film shots tell the powerful connection: the youthful shooting of a crow with an unexpected perfect shot, a crow suddenly flying straight at him, a crow’s claw seizing his wrist in a dream, the unforgettable taxidermist nosing “right into the down, /... inhal[ing] it like it was the first day ofspring” (23). Fact here eventuates into myth and the large landscapes and per­ sons of the later poems, expressed through a consciousness that includes Indian, Chinese, and Native American worldviews, as well as the landscapes that speak to Sowder. It will take a John Muir to scour the places he has already been. Most remarkable about Sowder’s sense of joy is that it penetrates beyond tragic loss of friend and family, even beyond divorce. He is often far ahead, calling back to us. “Joy is rooted in emptiness,” he says, “in not running away from your own pain” (57). We can be full even when we are empty, the night itself “great, luminous emptiness saturating, holding all things” (21). The “empty boat” of the title, derived from Thoreau and Tu Fu, glides and turns in the streams and lakes of these poems, carrying the meditating poet, often with...

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